Meconium?

I have been reading some other blogs and I like their short-post technique.  I feel like maybe I won't have this urge to write something instructive or educational or big and long and boring if I copy them.  So I am.

I get called to a code-blue in labor and delivery the other night.  I am hauling balls into the room with a nurse and there is a non-responsive baby just hanging out in the isolette all alone.  The L&D nurses are with mom and dad and the midwife or OB or whoever is looking at us bust in.

We immediately begin resuscitation, I bag and then suction and subsequently intubate.

The Neonatology Attending is not just an attending, he is a professor, not associate or assistant professor but senior Professor of Neonatology.

He walks in during the intubation, gets like an inch from my face and says in a very thick Indian accent

"This is weird right?, This is not normal?"

He moves away and I don't respond because I know him, I know its rhetorical, and I am sort-of busy.

We throw the baby into a transport isolette and we rocket off to the NICU.

We get to the NICU, which is only down the hall a bit, and I have a nurse bag while I hook up a ventilator.

When setting my ventilator settings the Attending asks me what I am setting, and just nods at me.  I draw a gas and another RT takes it to the lab to run it.  The other RT said the Attending followed her to the lab and asked why it was taking so long to run the gas about every 5 seconds, while a countdown was on the screen.

The Attending returns with the RT, who hands me a copy of the gas and I say to the nurses and doctors "7.18/72/22/base -11".

The Attending immediately starts reading the numbers again

"SEVEN ONE EIGHT, SEVENTY TWO... IS NO ONE LISTENING? NO ONE CARES? NO ONE CARES ABOUT THIS BABY? NO ONE CARES."

After being scolded by the Charge Nurse, (and there are not many people more intimidating than a Hardcore NICU Charge Nurse) he apologized and offered to get us all sandwiches and then laughed like buying us sandwiches is some sort of inside joke that he forgot we weren't a part of.

For the rest of the night, "This is weird right? This is not normal" became our slogan.