Some Days Suck

and yesterday was one of those days...from beginning to end.

Beginning with the end of a shift when a mom in her late 2os with a full term pregnancy came in complaining that she hadn't felt the baby move in several hours and we discovered it had died. She had multiple medical problems related to the pregnancy, and it turns out her placenta had abrupted, and over several hours decompensated and as the shift was ending they had to rush her for a c-section.

So then that afternoon when I was trying to sleep, I got a text that Dr. Ralph Feigin, the world renowned Physician-in-Chief of Texas Children's Hospital and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Baylor and man of the "Golden handshake" had died rather unexpectedly...which was very sad for me because he was an amazing man--brilliant, compassionate and nice, and always smiling--and I had so been looking forward to getting to train under him during residency.
Check out this website to see how amazing he was: http://www.bcm.edu/pa/feigin/index.cfm

Then when I went to work last night, the day continued to go downhill...we found out that the woman from that morning had coded in the OR and had coded 3 more times since then...and later that night died...leaving behind a husband and four small kids. After that we had 5 c-sections almost one right after the other and also delivered a baby with anencephaly :(

So, in total as I worked 70 hours over the past 5 nights...
I did get to deliver several more healthy babies...which was amazing and very exciting.
But in those 5 days we also delivered 3 full term dead babies, 2 with horrible congenital anomalies...and lost a mom.

It's been a very long week...