Nursery; The Woes, The Joys

Ok so being in nursery is becoming a bit monotonous! I mentioned previously that I don't exactly work in nursery itself, rather I'm in charge of all the post-delivery wards and have to do a head-to-toe examination on all the babies and discharge asap coz there's a shortage of beds!!! I mean seriously can't a mid-wife/nurse do that??  And when I'm done, I then become this kind of 'floating' staff-member that has to go help out wherever I'm needed:(

Anyway it's so amazing to see so many babies being delivered daily :) It's actually quite weird coz you have like a whole ward of babies with the same birth date! I wonder if they'l ever meet up again in the future??

 I guess it's becoming monotonous for me coz there's so many babies to see and there's always a rush to see each one and it ends up feeling like I work in a factory!

Typical scenario: "Hello mum how are you? How's baby doing? Are you going to breastfeed or use formula milk? Is baby feeding well? Has baby passed urine? And Stool? Okay now I need to examine baby" - followed by a head to toe examination."Okay mum your baby is fine, so baby is discharged". I move to the next bed to repeat the procedure while the nurse gives the immunisations and gives the mum the date for the follow-up visit. And so I move from cubicle to cubicle...and once I get to the last cubicle the 1st one has some new babies already! Alhamdulillah most of the babies are normal :)

It's actually quite a mission to communicate with the mums that don't speak any English! The Zulu word for urine involves clicking of the tongue - something I'm quite pathetic at and so it always sounds so funny and some mums still don't understand me LOL!

Another thing is that it's winter here and my hands are constantly cold so I feel really sorry for the tiny ones! It's really cute examining them but off course there's some things I just hate; like palpating the head of a just delivered baby - the hair is all matted with blood and amniotic fluid and oh gosh I don't even like to think what else!! I also hate my stethoscope coming into contact with the freshly cut umbilical cord - gross! Babies that have caput also kinda freak me out. (Caput is when the baby's head goes into this cone shape due to a difficult delivery, becomes normal after a while.)

 

It's really sad to see so many babies born to mums who are HIV positive. However the good news is that apparently our PMTCT programme  (prevention of mother to child transmission) is actually working :) Majority of babies of positive mums are now found negative :) The sad part is that some mums opt to formula feed (instead of exclusive breastfeeding) and they can't afford it so the babies end up dying from severe malnutrition:(
Anyway that's all for now....