Nurse Practitioner: A Case Study

At the start of her nursing career, Ms. Diane wanted to become a midwife; but when she graduated nursing school, she received a job in the neonatal intensive care unit, where she instantaneously fell in love with helping and taking care of premature babies. Because of the passion that Ms. Diane had developed for taking care of young children, she decided to become a nurse practitioner, and specialize in neonatal intensive care. Throughout her practitioner career she has met many memorable patients that have touched her heart intensely. She stated that while working in East Park Ridge hospital she met a mother whose baby was born at twenty-six weeks with a head bleeding and was placed on a ventilator due to her undeveloped lungs. The baby was too
When babies are born with a head bleed, doctors can insert a shunt in their little heads to aleviate some pressures that the build up of fluids has caused; and to prevent the babies from developing hydrocephalus a condition in which there is an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid, but this baby was just too small to handle the insertion of a shunt. Therefore, doctors decided to place a little reservoir to drain some of the fluid entering her tiny brain. The practitioner has to pull out the excess fluid daily. The mother of the baby was a first time mother and seeing her poor little baby in so much agony, she became very stress and was anxious. She would sit in the NICU to pray and eventually asked Ms. Diane to start praying with her to help calm her nerves down and she started to talk to Ms. Diane whenever she was not busy. "The baby's mother was a sweet, christian, young lady whom I became close to". After a few months in the NICU doctors were able to successfully insert the shunt in the baby’s brain, and sure enough the baby became well and was released from the