Birthday Nurse

50 Best Blogs for Neonatal Nurses Nursing Schools : LPN RN BSN MSN : Online Nursing Degree This is what I find surfing the blogging world...I had no idea!! Check out #9!! It makes me feel special :) Congrats to all the other bloggers out there who made the "Top 50 List" too!!

Things have been super busy/crazy/insane at work these last several months (welcome results of winter "coziness"!) and it has led us night shift people to think about our staffing situation. I'm asking for your advice/input/ideas!! My question is...how are you staffed on your units? What have you found that works best and what doesn't? How do you handle putting nurses on call? Any suggestions would be MORE than appreciated!! A little bit about our unit... We are a 17-bed L&D unit for both labor/delivery and antepartum . We average between 320-340 deliveries a month during most of the year, closer to 300-320 during the winter. We don't have a separate antepartum unit/rooms nor a triage area. We have 17 rooms that we use for all of the above. We triage/labor/deliver then after 2hr recovery move patients to postpartum. We have 2 OR's and then 4 separate PACU rooms for our 2hr C/S recoveries before we move them to postpartum. Our L&D nurses do both vag...

Wow, I'm been doing this blog in spurts lately...I end up doing it AFTER I've worked for the week ' cuz there's not much energy in between shifts! This month has been crazy busy, we were already pretty close to 300 babies when I left on Thursday morning!! I've had several nice deliveries, 2 of them last night!! Yay for double deliveries! The two last night were 2 within an hour, that's always good for getting the heartrate up! I did one delivery of "my girl" that I'd had since the beginning of the shift, then walked out and there was another girl that was 7-8 and for some reason the nurse that had her wanted me to take her and finish her delivery. I'm not sure why but the girl was unblocked and there wasn't much time to argue!!! By the time I walked down to the room (for the first time) the midwife said that she was 9+ and wanted to get back in the tub. I wouldn't have gotten her up to the tub at that close to delivery, but the midw...

No babies this week, but last week I went OOT (out of town) before I got to talk about the 2 nice deliveries I had one of the nights I went in extra. The first was a C/S that was walking to the back as I came on. I almost feel guilty "claiming" that baby because I hardly even got to say "Hi I'm BDay Nurse" to the mom before the drape goes up and the baby comes out. Then in recovery they are usually so out of it, and after laboring all day, all they want to do is sleep. Doesn't leave much time for the "bonding" time. But nice, quick section. We were actually in the OR from in time to out time less than an hour. That's pretty impressive! It was a one of my favorite CRNA's on too, so that always lends some humor to the situation. I was ready to go home after my section recovery was over and I probably could have, but there were 2 patients who were almost complete so I told them I would stay until both of them delivered so that then they wo...

So let's see...I haven't had a baby in a good week! I think I'm failing in the "delivery" part of my job! I can labor them fine apparently...but I have a hard time getting the baby out! I have had 3 nice (well, exciting if nothing else) births the last couple weeks. 1st baby was a super fun couple that I cervidiled one night and then ended up doing the section for the next night because her cervix stopped at 9cm. They were lots of fun and their baby was ADORABLE! Honestly, most new borns aren't that impressive looking...but this little guys was super cute :) I even went back to visit them the next day on my day off to see how they were doing. I love stories like that! Next delivery was one of those "all of a sudden" ones where I had the C/S papers sitting on the desk because she'd been about 4cm for the last 3hrs. We had put in an IUPC and said we'd give her 2hrs and then were going to the back. 2hrs later she was complete! Yay !!! She did...