team awesome

I love being a nurse. Some days, it all just feels right, and I always find it interesting when those days aren't the quiet ones. Yesterday we sat around for most of the shift, looking up quotes online to put on the back of our ward nurse t-shirts. The patients were lovely, and no one was in pain; I didn't do a stitch of work all day, but it didn't feel all that good.

Today was the opposite. Grace, Katy and myself were stationed amidst the kiddos in A Ward. We walked into a room full of kids in pain, started running from the minute we finished report and then got a second wave of cast-footed babies who will have more surgery tomorrow. It was, in a word, hectic.

Enter Team Awesome. I'm the only pediatric nurse out of the three of us, but you'd never have known it. Our evening consisted of passing kids back and forth, spreading out blankets and strewing toys all over the floor. We had children in casts all over the place and most of the time we didn't know which ones were our own patients. For about half of the shift, the air was filled with shrieks, a stereo chorus of ear-splitting protests over minor insults, more often than not entirely imagined.

The rest of the time, in between the hollering, it was heaven. Nessie, a bundle of braids sporting a neon orange cast, adopted the three-year old a few beds down. They parked themselves on the floor with Grace, surrounded by blocks and legos. I walked past to give some meds to one of my kids when I heard singing coming from below my line of vision. Nessie was delivering a heartfelt, if barely-intelligible, version of He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, complete with actions. I parked myself on the blanket next to her and joined in, suggesting verses about little babies and mamas and papas. We sang for quite a while, renditions of By My Side and other unknown-to-me Liberian gospel songs weaving in and out through the screams still occasionally emitting from the other side of the room.

Timothy had come in earlier in the day for a checkup and ended up getting admitted for surgery to take one of the pins out of his leg. After his surgery, I had to give him some pain medicine. I squirted the liquid into his mouth and prepared to walk away when I realized that his sly little self hadn't swallowed. I sat down on his bed and began to cajole. Swallow it. Swallow it. Have you swallowed it? Come now Timothy, just swallow it. I give you sticker. You want sticker? Every so often I'd ask him if he'd complied, to which he would reply by opening his mouth to show me that, in fact, all the tylenol and codeine were still swishing around in there. He eventually let the offending mixture slide down his throat, grinning a rotten, gap-toothed smile at me that made me realize that I wouldn't have minded if he had taken a half hour longer.

I love days like today. They're the ones that make me seriously question whether or not I'll ever be able to go back to American nursing.