Pediatrics pt. 1

This was my first day of clinical in my Pediatric  
rotation. Actually it was my first time at this 
hospital ever. I had no expectations. Pediatric 
nursing had never been for me what it was for so 
many of my friends in nursing school, the siren 
song of ideal practice. I love children but the 
idea of them lying in hospital beds and with 
NG-tubes up their noses was heartbreaking. 
No, pediatric nursing was just going to be a 
step to my real practice goals, or so I thought. 
Funny how expectations warp things. Seven 
weeks ago I entered my OB rotation expecting 
to find my place in the nursing world. My 
Valhala of practice. I had always seen myself as a L&D nurse and then getting my Certified Midwife 
and master's degree. That was before L&D and maternity nursing fell flat. So flat indeed that I struggled 
with the content of the class, felt board and listless during clinical, and lacked motivation to study. 
It was the healthiness of the patients I couldn't wrap my mind around. It was the loud and pushy L&D 
nurses that made me feel estranged in the clinical setting I had thought would be my perfect clinical 
setting. This was the mindset with which I walked into my new clinical instructors cluttered office that 
first day. My life was beginning to feel like those stacks of papers in Ruth Paul’s office. Precarious and 

unsturdy they sat placidly, stubbornly, on the shelf and yet at any moment might topple.

“Are you interested in working here when you graduate then?” My clinical instructor’s voice 

jolted me back to reality. She was asking me this after responding to my question of how 

long she had worked there, only offered by me in politeness, I of course did not really care.

“Umm not really” I stammered like a village fool back peddling his unicycle. “I love children, 

I’ve just never really pictured myself working with them in nursing.” “Do you have experience 

with kids?” Boy did I have experience. This semester found me at the tail end of my second 

summer working at a kid’s summer camp as the health medic (technically) or as everyone 

called me, camp nurse. Before that I had worked as a child’s swim instructor in high school 

and summers during college. I got kids. I know that sounds proud, it wasn't that I was 

amazingly patient or a motherly figure, I just got how they thought and learned. I discovered 

early on in my middle school babysitting years that children understand and see a lot more 

than adults give them credit for. Swim lesson teaching taught me that kids are capable of respect 

but only as far as you require it of them, that they need rules and limits to feel safe, and 

meaningful individualized praise to feel like they are a success. Other people saw it too, 

they often commented to me how I was unlike the other swim instructors, how my kids 

listened to me. About how they actually learned something during those 45 minute free-for-alls 

in the lap lanes of the noxious chlorine soaked paddling pools.

To my professor I simply replied a short. “Yeah, I grew up around kids and have worked with them 

at camps and stuff.” After my brief orientation I found out I would be in the Cardiac Intensive Care 

Unit (CT-ICU) that first day. I had never been on an ICU at all before let alone one as specialized 

as this. So water bottle in hand I navigated my way through the hospital and down the elevator to 

the CT-ICU. I was placed with a nurse and my first impression of her was that she was tiny and 

that she brought her iced coffee into the patient's room while getting report; both very shallow 

and irrelevant interpretations and not reflective of what my day was to be like at all. I had no 

expectation. I didn’t feel like I needed the staff to like me particularly or that I had to ‘make 

a good impression.” I was just there to learn, one of my very favorite things, and was therefore 

just perfectly myself.

Our patient was a large newborn post heart surgery a few days. He was hooked up to a ventilator, 

which in bypassing his larynx, made it impossible for him to audibly cry. He was silent even at 

his most distressed. In the CT-ICU it is one patient to one nurse, what seems like a crazy ratio 

coming from med surg units, and the patients are so critical that the nurse is kept busy all 

throughout the day. Our patient shared its room with another patient, and so we shared it with 

another nurse. This nurse had graduated from my school 4 years back! A happy finding, but 

one I would come to find was not rare at this hospital. Her name was Mari, she had blond hair, 

an enthusiastic personality, big smile and a firm handshake - not unlike some golden retrievers 

I’ve know.

By the end of the day I was left floored by the severity of these babies illnesses. Not only had 

I never seen children this sick, I had never seen adults this sick either. Everything that you 

picture when you think of a newborn baby was off and most of these babies had spent their 

whole lives in the hospital. On this day I got to experiences how the parents different cultural 

roles played a part in each child's care. A rosary hung over a bed rail or a bible verse scrawled 

in colorful writing were signs of the religious tendencies. But there were other things too - Dads 

talking about baseball, older siblings leaving pictures they had drawn for their sick little brother 

or sister, stuffed animals bright and new never having been hugged. Odd how in the midst of 

all these interventions and intensive care the normal things of a family still flourish and grow.

This was my first taste of pediatric nursing. Remarkably it was also my first time experiencing 

intensive care nursing. At the end of the day my mind still buzzed with excitement and 

fascination at how much there was to learn in these areas! Like a potted plant long outgrown 

its space I felt my stiff uninterested roots quiver and stretch out to nourishment as I was re-planted

into a garden of opportunities.