A Week in the Lying In

So I decided I'm not going to keep my current life as a trainee nurse a secret but instead, ironically like all other things, I'm going to blog about it. Let's just say I'm training in a tertiary government hospital in Metro Manila (okay FINE, I'm talking about QMMC) and is assigned in the OB Ward which consist of 3 parts, OB Main Ward, OB Extension and Lying-In. We, the trainees, are called PNTPs and I am a part of the 12 trainees of our batch.

Our schedule in our first two weeks of stay is strictly 6am-2pm Monday to Friday but we were told that afterward we will have our own rotational schedules and 2 off days. We 12 were split into 3 groups and were assigned to one of the sub-wards.

Overcrowded maternity ward in a Metro Manila hospital. (Not actual picture, but close)

First stop was Lying-In. In this area, our patients mostly consist of post NSD women carrying newborns and looking for a comfortable place to sit on because there are 3 mothers and 3 babies in one bed in a normal, good and non-toxic day. 5-6 mothers (times 2 because of the babies) in busy seasons. It was surreal for me at first but we learned to adjust that on the 2nd day, it's normal for us to ask "Ilan po kayo sa kama?" when looking for a place for a newcomer.

Our tasks consist of taking the vital signs of both mother and child, trying to keep the ward clean and orderly despite the overcrowding and the choir of crying babies, logging in names in different lists and logbooks, charting (but we're not allowed yet because we're officially newbies), injecting contraceptives in the afternoon to willing mothers and answering questions of relatives regarding billing procedures, birth certificates and so on.

There are no IV medications to prepare, only oral drugs to instruct. Occasionally, a patient will arrive with an IV but it's always for discontinuation so we get to do that also. The climax of the day is always the intramuscular injection of the contraceptive DMPA every afternoon. This definitely makes up for the lack of needlework within the shift.

In general, I think this is a good warm up for our 2 month duty in the ward. I look forward to the time I will get to roam around the place with absolute familiarity with the comings and goings of the institution like the way those senior trainees do. Imagine, they got to learn so much in such a short span of time.

I will too.