
My first night on pediatrics, a 19 year-old boy coded and died. Unexpectedly and out of the blue.
I'd been a med/surg RN for a year, and because of this experience, I was transferred to Nights on peds after only a week of Day orientation.
One of my patients was a six week-old baby, in to rule-out meningitis. She was fine, to be discharged in the morning. There were no parents staying the night with her, unusual, but not unheard of. No meds, no IV's. Just feed her and change her.
Yet I was freaking out inside. "How often do I feed her?" I asked the other nurses. I mean, what did I know about a newborn? I was 22.
"Do I wake her up or let her sleep? How do I know when she's eaten enough?"
They smiled reassuringly. "She'll let you know. You'll be fine."
The baby slept on and I tended to my other patients. The night was quiet.
Then Teddy coded.
He'd woken up to pee. But instead, his mother reported, he opened his mouth and out came the blood. For some reason she attempted to catch it in cups. She thought we might want to test it later, see where it was from.
Teddy was not my patient, but I knew him from my week on day-shift, a fun, sarcastic, 19 year-old kid. He'd been diagnosed with leukemia at age 11, gone into remission, and been fine.
Then, the year before, he'd relapsed. And, although the chemo was helping, it had left him susceptible to a terrible fungal infection in his lungs.
Later, we would find out that the infection had eaten away at his pulmonary artery. Which picked that moment that he'd gotten up to pee to burst.
Because we didn't know this at the time, and didn't realize nothing we did was going to help, we worked on him for almost two hours. Pushing drugs, CPR, hanging blood.
His mother lost it when the nursing supervisor tried to pour the cups of blood down the sink. In her bathrobe, she got on the elevator and disappeared. The nursing supervisor went after her.
I ran to the blood bank, two, three times. Then hovered in the doorway, mostly watching the five, ten, it seemed like a hundred, people working on him.
Until, from somewhere down the long corridor, I heard my six week-old cry. I went to her and, without thinking, changed her diaper, popped open a bottle, and sat down in that dimly-lit room to feed her.
While I was rocking her back to sleep, her father appeared in the doorway. He looked exhausted. "I couldn't get back to sleep," he confessed. "I figured I might as well be here."
I handed her off and went back down the hall. The code was over, time-of-death recorded on the chart. Teddy's mother had reappeared with his father and sister, and they were saying goodbye.
The day nurses slowly drifted in. When my new head-nurse arrived, she put her hand on my shoulder and leaned down close to my ear.
"Welcome to peds," she said.
Working with sick children was like that. Most of them, like that baby, got better and went home. I see their smiling faces, their happy families, as one big blur.
Other kids, fewer, got sicker or died. And even these many years later, I remember every one.


