19 Years and Counting Caring for Babies
A Newborn Intensive Care Nurse, taking care of hundreds of premature and sick babies every year.
When a mother goes in to have her baby, she’s hoping that everything will be fine. That the baby will be healthy, and in a couple days, her and her partner will be able to bring the baby home with them. But it doesn’t always go as planned. This is what doctors and nurses in the NICU are for. Premature and sick babies.
NICU stands for Newborn Intensive Care Unit. This is where Erin Cook, 40, works at St. Joseph’s hospital in Marshfield Wisconsin. Working 60 hours in two weeks, Erin works with sick and premature babies. Since she was young, Erin always knew that she wanted to work with babies. She applied to the Birth Center in Marshfield after she graduated college from Viterbo University, Lacrosse, Wisconsin. At the time, the NICU didn’t have internships, so she was placed into Cardiothoracics (relating to, involving, or specializing in the heart, chest, arteries, and heart valves). Not long after that, Erin was offered an interview in the NICU, where she became a nurse, just like she hopped. In this role, Erin was able to experience both the Birth Center and the Newborn Intensive Care Unit.
“And that’s how I found my forever home.”, says Erin.
A traditional day starts at 0700. She will check the baby’s vitals — blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature — every three hours. Then throughout the day, Erin will check the babies skin, lung sounds, bowel sounds, head, hands, feet, and mouth, checking for any abnormalities, like rashes, cuts, or bruises, and even missing fingers/toes. She will then change their diaper, and feed them, depending on if they can use a bottle, or if they need to be tube fed through their stomach. Erin then tucks them in for the day either in an open crib or isolette. She usually cares for 1–3 babies in a day, depending on their needs.
The NICU cares for babies as early as 23 weeks, all the way through a full term of 40 weeks. After they are born, babies must stay as long as it takes them to maintain respiratory support, to have the ability to eat everything by bottle while gaining weight, and not have any apnea episodes (where the baby stops breathing for greater than 20 seconds) and/or bradycardia episodes (where their heart rate drops below a set number) for more than five days. Working in the NICU, Erin and other nurses attend all deliveries, and then are present if the baby needs resuscitation. Erin gives babies all types of medications, from oral, to intravenous and intramuscular. Sometimes she even admits blood transfusions to the babies. She weighs them every night, and measures their length and head circumference every Monday, until the babies are ready to go home with their families, typically after 3–4 months.
Erin talks about how being a nurse for a baby is hard sometimes, “There are some really sad days — knowing when I come back to work the baby will have died and knowing parents have gotten terrible news about their baby — It’s very hard not to break down with them as they cry… I’ve cried after work plenty of times… It can be frustrating like any job… the people you work with, the many different doctors we sometimes have to deal with, the organization’s decisions… sometimes babies go home with parents that they shouldn’t go home with but [there’s] nothing we can do.”
Being a nurse in the NICU isn’t the only difficult thing in Erin’s life. She has three girls at home, and her husband, Kent. Kent also has a very demanding job, being a pharmacist at the Marshfield Medical Center in Westin, Wisconsin. Living in Mosinee, both Kent and Erin have long commutes to work. Both Marshfield and Westin are one hour commutes in opposite directions, Mosinee is right in the middle for them. Because both Erin, and her husband, have very unpredictable jobs, sometimes the girls go to hang with grandma and grandpa for a night or two, while mom and dad are at work.
In 1978 and 1979, a year before Erin was born, her mother gave birth to two baby girls. Sadly, one of them was stillborn, and the other only lived for a couple of hours because her lungs weren’t developed. At that time, there wasn’t the technology to aid premature babies, and support their growth, but with today’s technology, we can.
When Erin was younger, her aunt was a nurse, and her mother worked at the local clinic as a medical assistant for several years. After that her mother took a break from the hospital to stay at home with her children, and babysit the kids of other friends and family. Looking back, it’s easy to see that these influential people and growing up with younger children, were contributors to Erin’s decision to become a NICU nurse.
“I am in awe everyday at how strong the tiniest of babies are…what they overcome to eventually go home. I am proud to say we can save babies the same age that my mother ended up losing because they didn’t have the technology or equipment to do so.”, says Erin Cook with pride.
