We had a new night nurse last night. She is about #14 and one of the worst, which was a surprise since all the other nurses from this particular agency have been great.
Sam awoke at about 3:30am to find her sitting next to Lula, completely oblivious that she was SOAKED in sweat and fussing. Sam figured out she had given Lula six times the amount of formula she was supposed to get and didn't even know how much breastmilk she had given her in total. This is a trained LPN (one step down from an RN). Our 20 year old student babysitters are so much better at this. Needless to say she will not be returning.
Luckily Lula is such a trooper that despite her rotten night she was bright eyed and calm when I left her this morning. And Roan slept until 8:30!
I keep vacillating between feeling decidedly cursed and unlucky that Lula has so many problems, and feeling SO lucky that our situation isn't worse. One of this nurses other patients is a 19 year old kid who was in a car accident at 17 and has permanent brain damage. He has a feeding tube and is non-communicative and has no hope of recovering. His father died of a heart attack a year after from stress leaving the mom to take care of the kid by herself.
When I take Lula to Bellevue I see kids who are deformed, listless sacks of malnourished limbs being wheeled from one clinic to the next and I don't know how the parents keep going. What is there to look forward to? How does one survive all the work when there is nothing to look forward to?