Meghan Philcox: Earning the Title of Healthcare Hero

Why am I doing this?

I asked myself that question more times than I would like to admit through my junior year of nursing school. Entering the world of healthcare during the time of COVID was daunting. As I was struggling through nursing school, I was also watching nurses break under the stress of working in healthcare during a pandemic. It made me wonder if nursing school was even worth the time, energy, and money if I was going to burnout of my career as soon as I entered the workforce.

Even with these doubts in my mind, I applied and interviewed for nursing externships for the summer, and one sunny Wednesday morning, I walked out of class to a missed call. I called back and was offered the externship in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at the Children’s Hospital of Georgia.

After accepting the position, I hurriedly called my mom, my eyes brimming with tears, to tell her that I had gotten my dream position, a position I did not think I would be lucky enough to have until years after graduation.

For the next month, I dreamed about all the glorious work I would be doing. I thought about all the high-tech nursing skills I would get to perform, the highly trained nurses I would get to learn from, and all the opportunities I would have to save lives (and look good doing it). I arrived on the unit, feeling like a superhero who could do anything, even though, in reality, I was unprepared and clueless.

When my nurse was orienting me to the unit, she talked to me about nursing care for dying pediatric patients. She warned me that the first patient death I experienced would be the hardest, but that I would become accustomed to it as I continued to work in the unit.

Yet after the warning, we had a good stretch of patients. I watched kids recover after getting new hearts, kids come back after an infection had wracked their body, kids beating the odds against their disease. Until they didn’t. Suddenly, it felt like we were losing patients weekly. I watched patients go home with hospice, max out of oxygen support, or finally succumb to their chronic disease.

Contrary to what my nurse said, it was not my first death that impacted me the most. It was the death of the patient whom I took care the longest. She was a precious 5-month-old with an anoxic brain injury, meaning her brain had gone without oxygen for minutes, leaving her with permanent brain damage.

By the time we got her as a patient, she was completely reliant on a ventilator and feeding tube, and she responded minimally to painful stimuli. I cared for her for five out of the seven nights she was there while the parents grieved, struggled to process their new reality, and wrestled with the decision of remaining on or removing life support.

My favorite part every night would be giving her a bath. It took three staff members to give her a bath and change her sheets because of the complex maze of lines and tubes attached to her. While we bathed her, we would all talk to the baby the entire time. We would tell her where she was, what we were doing, how pretty she was, how much her family loved her, on and on.

A picture of a child in the PICU, from the internet

It was such a special time for me. We realized that she was most likely living her last week on earth, so we did everything in our power to make those moments of our shift a loving, comfortable, peaceful time for this little girl.

I do not know how much the little girl was able to hear. Because she was just five months old, I know she did not understand a word we were saying. But I hope that she felt loved, safe, and well-cared for every night as we washed her, put her in a colorful gown, clipped a bright bow in her hair, and wrapped her pink blanket back around her.

Finally, after a week in the PICU, the parents came to the decision to withdraw care. As I walked into my last shift of the week at 1845, her heart rate was in the 20s. By 1910, she had passed away.

My nurse and I allowed the family time to say good-bye, and I prepared myself for what was coming next. I did not want to seem weak or emotional in front of these experienced PICU nurses, so I tried to compartmentalize, put up walls, and do whatever I could so I did not break down into a sobbing mess the next time I had to walk into that room.

The parents decided to leave before post-mortem care, not wishing to watch that process. My nurse walked me through all the steps of preparing the body and showed me where to gather all the supplies. When I walked into the room, all I could think was how peaceful this little girl looked, no longer covered in lines and tubes, no longer surrounded by noisy machines. As I took in her little body on that big hospital bed, all I could hope for was that she had found comfort and healing in heaven. Not wanting to get emotional, I quickly tried to find something to do to stay busy.

So, I did what I had done for the past week. I started giving her a bath and talking to her. There was something so soothing about wiping away all the residue from the bandages, tape, and electrodes from her skin, something so deeply intimate to be trusted completely with a person’s body, to wash her one last time.

We put her in a dress that her mother had picked out, and the whole time we did this, I told her about the dress, the different colors, and how beautiful she looked.

Once we got to the morgue, my nurse and I both took turns saying good-bye to her privately. When it was my turn, I rested my hand on her forehead and said a little blessing over her, thanked her for allowing me to care for her, then left. My nurse and I took a few minutes to cry in the hallway outside the morgue, then we both gathered ourselves and headed back to the unit to finish working our shift.

Taking care of this patient helped solidify why I want to be a nurse. I know that there will be moments of frustration, exhaustion, and emotional fatigue. But I want to be the nurse who cherishes the simple moments, who understands how nice it can feel to get a good bath and clean sheets, and who never lets her patients feel scared or alone. If I can maintain my level of empathy and always view interactions with my patients as an honor to care for an innocent, precious child, I feel that I will be deserving of the title “Healthcare Hero.”

Meghan Philcox is a senior nursing student who will graduate in May 2022. She hopes to return to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in the Children’s Hospital of Georgia as an RN after graduation. She also plans on pursuing a master’s degree in nursing education.