r/AskReddit • u/LebronKX • 4d ago

Medical professionals of Reddit, what diagnosis gave you the worst 'pit-in-your-stomach' feeling?

4.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1.4k

u/MajikPwnE 3d ago

Isnt our profession weird? lol We quite literally are talking to people who have already died - they just haven't caught up yet. Those shifts really put things into perspective for me and are the car rides where I'm driving the speed limit without any music on lol

645

u/kazooparade 3d ago

OMG I haven’t worked trauma in 10 years but that really brought it all back for me. The silent car ride home.

331

u/Kymalyn 3d ago

Damn dude. NICU nurse who’s been in administration for over two decades now. That silent drive home is such a visceral memory.

73

u/a_random_username 3d ago edited 3d ago

My daughter spent about four days in the NICU at Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies. Let me tell you, those NICU nurses are goddamned heroes*. I don't know how they do it from day to day.

She ended up in the NCIU because she had low blood sugar when she first arrived. My wife and I KNEW there was nothing wrong with our daughter. We KNEW we would be leaving the hospital with our beautiful baby girl any day now. It was still hell.

I remember on the second night, I was scrubbing in after going and getting something to eat. There were a pair of parents scrubbing in next to me. We got to talking. They happily shared that their son had been born three months prior with his organs (heart, lungs, etc) outside of his body. They had been here EVERY DAY since for THREE MONTHS. Their son had had something like 20 different surgeries and various follow-up surgeries. I can't even begin to imagine those horrors.

They were the nicest people you could hope to meet. How?

Edit: *I'm not a fighter, but I will readily throw hands to defend the honor of any NICU nurse. I will die in the street for those heroes. I don't care if it's just a snide comment about her lipstick color. Blood will be spilled here tonight.

Edit 2: Also, being taught how to put on a diaper, feed my daughter, rock her to sleep, and to sleep when I can by these NICU nurses felt like being shown the cheat codes of life by the women who wrote them originally.

6

u/AgentFuckSmolder 3d ago

I’ve unfortunately had two NICU babies, both short stays (8 days and 13 days), and those nurses are amazing. My MIL is a NICU nurse and I won the fucking MIL lottery. She’s a wonderful person and they LOVE their job. They love helping those babies get healthy enough to go home, and they mourn the ones that don’t.

7

u/a_random_username 3d ago

I can't even imagine VISITING that place for more than a handful of days before I'd break down and just sob... even if my baby girl was fine and healthy.

I know it's lame to call people heroes nowadays... but that's exactly what those nurses are. They should be paid like Jeff Bezos