Wednesday, August 5, 2015

From A Patient's Perspective...

Now, more than ever, I realize how scary it can be for someone who doesn't have a background in medicine to be admitted to the hospital. It's even scarier to be a parent and watch your child be admitted. My whole life I've always thought that raising a baby, at least until they're around age 3 or 4 would be a pretty easy thing to do. What do babies do? They eat, sleep, cry, babble, crawl, and walk. Pretty easy to deal with. Never have I been scared to be around babies, to hold them, to change their diapers, or to feed them. Raising a healthy baby should be a pretty easy thing to do right?

But now, for the first time, I'm seeing everything that can go wrong in the health of a newborn baby. Of course, some of it can be attributed to the parents (note: cocaine use and pregnancy should never occur at the same time), but some of it has absolutely nothing to do with the parents at all. Sometimes, even though mom and dad are perfectly healthy, babies can develop abnormally and quite frankly, it's nobody's fault and there's no reason for it. In the last few days, I've really seen how scary it is for parents to see their precious newborn baby decompensate right in front of their eyes. It can be something as simple as a sudden vomiting episode or a just a feeling that maybe the baby is a bit more lethargic than yesterday. Even a sudden temperature of 100.4 (something that wouldn't normally be a huge issue in adults) can be worrisome in newborns. For each of the three clues I just listed, I've now seen cases where the baby was admitted to the NICU and it turned out to be so much worse - real issues that meant the difference between life or death for the baby. Perhaps if the parents had brought the child in one day later, he would've died...if they had brought him in one day earlier, he would've lived.

Watching these parents with their babies, I can't help but imagine myself as a mother and having to watch my own kids go through the same thing. It's impossible. What must they be thinking when the nurses are poking their baby for blood? When the doctors come around to round and speak in what seems to be a completely different language? What do they think when they don't see or speak to a doctor for hours or even days at a time while they watch their baby helpless and lifeless in the crib? I'm seeing so much of this play out in the NICU and I've realized it's such a difficult scenario to grasp unless you're in the shoes of the parents or unless you have an understanding of how physicians function in the hospital.

As a medical student, I'm often in between the parents and the physicians. Sometimes I might even spend more time talking to the parents and relaying information if rounds occur when the parents are not beside their baby. One thing to point out though is that even though parents might not see the doctors around all the time, they are always up to date on the baby's status and on what's going on. At Children's Oakland, these Attendings and residents are on top of their work in the NICU. Rarely do they take a break and that's only usually for some food and coffee to recharge. From my end, I just hope that I'm doing enough to help these parents understand what's going on with their baby and help them realize that the medical team is doing everything to make sure that the baby can return home in good health. 

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