Too Much of a Good Thing

As I have mentioned, I currently work as a nurse in the pediatric intensive care unit at a large academic medical center where we see a wide variety of children of all ages and abilities.  Throughout all of the new nurse classes I was required to attend as part of my orientation, the instructors continuously encouraged the use of the music channel available on our televisions to help soothe your patients.  While I appreciated the fact new nurses were being encouraged to use music to help modify the environment, I also had a few concerns.  I had noticed when walking around the unit at night that I did hear the the music channel playing... over, and over, and over, and over..... for hours on end, even if the child was fast asleep.  Add to that the fact that the channel essentially repeated the same 3-4 "soothing" songs (ironically several were CCR covers played on the xylophone) over and over again all night long. I found that I was having trouble falling asleep after my shift because the songs were playing over and over in my head.

Can you say "habituation"?!?!

Luckily, since August, the music channel has expanded its repertoire.  And of course, I am never shy about speaking up in all of my classes to clarify how to use the music channel appropriately.  I encourage nurses to put the channel on to create a soothing environment to help distract, calm, and encourage sleep.  But once the child is asleep, it is so important to remember to turn it off instead of letting it play for 12 hours straight.

I love that my hospital encourages nurses to use this resource and I hope to continue to educate on the appropriate uses of ambient music, especially in a unit where children are critically ill and restful sleep is vital.  This education role is one of the things I love about being a music therapist and a nurse.

Musical Intuition

The other day one of my colleagues said to me "It is so weird to see you as a nurse! I'm just curious, do you still use music with your patients?"

My answer was: YES. All the time. I have noticed all throughout school that even though I have learned many new nursing skills, my strength as a nurse comes from my ability to interact with people, which was developed through my work as a music therapist. And despite all that I have learned in nursing school, my brain still thinks like a music therapist. Not a musician. Not a therapist. A music therapist.

The minute a baby starts crying, my instinct immediately is to start singing to them to try to comfort them. Sometimes I don't even realize I am doing it. I had a baby a few weeks ago whose parents had left a Broadway hits CD at his bedside. I was going through my assessment, checking pulses, giving meds, changing his diaper, and apparently singing and humming along the entire time to Oliver! and West Side Story. Later my preceptor said to me "It was so cool how you were singing to the baby. He totally loved it!" I was shocked- I had no idea I was even doing it.

But I will often find myself sitting in the dark in the middle of the night, holding or comforting a crying baby, and the first thing I will try is singing to them. Some nurses immediately reach for the pacifier- or maybe even the morphine!- or try bundling, sweet ease, suctioning, decreased stimulation, but the first thing that I try is singing. And I have to say, it works every time.

I hope that I never stop thinking like a music therapist.

A New Kind of Normal

Today I took my Dad for his fourth and final day of his stem cell harvest. It was a really nice day and I realized how much I have come to look forward to the days that I take him to treatment. I found out my Dad had a tumor on his spinal cord on my 3rd day as a registered nurse in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. My Dad, one of the healthiest people I know, has cancer? Lying in bed the night before the surgery, I tried out the words in my head: "My dad has cancer." It felt so foreign on my tongue.

I would say I am a optimistic realist. Not a fake, never-gonna-happen, sickly sweet half-glass full kind of girl. But rather, I just try to find the best possible outcome in every situation. And while I definitely don't LIKE the fact that my dad has Multiple Myeloma- I think it SUCKS- there have been some positive memories as well. The first happened the weekend of his surgery. My brother came down from Minnesota to be with us, and we spent that weekend hanging with my dad in his hospital room, eating Portillos, and playing games. It was the first time that we had spent time as "the original family of four" for a long time. I love my husband of course, and my sister-in-law and niece, but there is something to be said for being able to spend an extended period of time together as the original 4. The people who have known you for your entire life, who you can be your authentic self with at all times. My dad felt bad as I missed the wedding of a good friend in Colorado to be with him, but honestly, there was no place in the world that I would rather have been. It was a great moment, and I was so happy to be able to share a similar time together this past Monday on the first day of the stem cell harvest.

I have also been able to spend a lot of quality time with my Dad. Hours of time just sitting together, waiting for an appointment or a test, just passing the time in the hospital by talking. We talk about myeloma and his treatment plan- but we also talk normal things as well. Everyday life. Time that we would not have had if he had not gotten sick. Fact is, most of the time, the world moves too fast. We don't take the time to just sit and talk and catch up. There is always someplace we need to be, something that needs to be done, that we miss these moments. So, I feel like the luckiest girl around to be able to spend this kind of time together.

Yesterday, a girl at work mentioned that she saw my pictures on facebook of the stem cell harvest and asked what was going on. "My dad has cancer, but he's doing great." I told her. And I noticed, for the first time, it felt ok.