Personal Narrative: A Night At Rady Children's Hospital

Superior Essays
These were my tenth (11/12) and eleventh (11/13) shifts following Meagan on the medical/surgical floor at Rady Children’s Hospital. On Thursday, November 12th, I followed Meagan from 0930 to 2230 while she worked as the resource nurse. This was a new and different experience compared to following her as a normal nurse on the floor and even as the charge nurse. For most of the day, we watched other nurses’ patients so that they could go on break or accomplish other major tasks for their patients, helped nurses who were really busy, set up and prepared rooms for incoming patients, and started intravenous lines (I.V.s) (Meagan’s specialty). It was also an extra peculiar day because I followed Meagan to a charge nurse meeting and also into her boss’s office where we ended up talking for about an hour concerning several different things. Absolutely nothing was familiar about this day, other than the fact that I was still following Meagan.
Friday was similar to the typical night shifts I
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for one of the patients who had pulled his I.V. out. He had to be poked 3 times the night before and had been poked once already (by his nurse) by the time we were going into his room to poke him again. As soon as we started setting everything up, he began to cry. I tried to distract him by asking him questions, but right before Meagan went to poke him, the boy’s mother requested that we use the new intradermal lidocaine that they had used the night before in the emergency room. Meagan had not used this method on a patient before, but she had tried it on herself when they introduced it to the nurses and she said it was extremely painful. After her personal experience, she had decided the lidocaine was not a method she wanted to incorporate into her regular practice, but since this family had specifically requested it, she wanted to fulfill their request (customer

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