A moment on night shift

It's 2:30 am, GMT and A ward has finally settled into a bit of a quiet lull, with an occasional cough or baby's cry disrupting the peace. There are 20 beds in this room, however many of the patients are children, so their parent or caregiver sleeps on a mattress literally under the bed. Sometimes mom has another baby, or mom is the patient, so there are two people under each bed. There are a lot of warm bodies packed into this hot room right now!

Some nights it gets complicated when mom decides to sleep on the bed and your patient gets relegated to the mattress below, baby brother is in your way too, it's 3 am and you can't reach your patient to check vitals- 'cause he's buried too deeply in the little cave under the bed. :-) That's when imagination and perseverance kick in - clambering over their bags, pulling at the mattresses with all your might at an angle through the bed's legs, trying valiantly not to land on your own rump, giggling at the situation and wondering how you're ever going to describe this one to people at home. And how that would so not work at home - could you imagine the look on people's faces? "Sir, here's your bed, ma'am, you go right under the bed."

We've switched from general surgery to plastic surgery now, for the simple reasons that those are the surgeons we now have onboard. No, we're not doing boob jobs and facelifts! I would encourage people to check the Mercy Ships website, http://www.mercyships.org/ for pics of what we get up to- crazy facial tumors, burn contracture releases, etc., that we're up to now. I'm learning so much and feel quite a fish out of water, mainly because I have no clue about plastics. Cardiothoracics, all the way. (Go CTSU!)

For example, I have two patients who have seizure disorders and have fallen into fires, whose limbs have shrivelled up and are now useless. So, what our surgeons are doing is releasing the taut skin, the scarring,  stretching out limbs, covering wounds with grafts of their own skin shaved from a healthy spot on a leg usually. So these patients have a graft site and a donor site, sometimes a few sites if the burn was not contained to just one part of the body. It's all very painful as  you can imagine and prone to infection, so we nurses are being a bit overly neurotic about infection control right now. The difference between a clean wound and an infected one can mean a hundred days onboard as you wait for it to slowly heal- with daily painful dressing changes - and we're only here for another 3 months then the ship sails away. Well, there's your motive for prayer for these next few months! That wounds will heal!!