ICU nurse

My name is Meggin Major, and I am pediatric intensive care nurse.

Here in the States, I'm in a hospital, work 12 hour shifts, currently I work night shifts.

So I work from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Typically where I work, we get a lot of trauma.

So, children who have had traumatic head injuries, who have been hit by cars or in car wrecks, or have fallen.

We get burns.

We get children with cancer who have gotten extremely sick with sepsis.

And then we get, we also get the scheduled surgeries like spinal fusions and kidney transplants.

When not in the States, I work in African countries.

I have worked 16 hour shifts delivering an average of 185 babies day.

I have worked 8 hour shifts on a hospital ship off the coast of Madagascar and the coast of Cameroon, doing surgeries on mass tumors of the face and neck.

And I've worked in 12 hour shifts, four days a week, in a local bush hospital in a very rural part of Togo.

We worked 12 hour shifts on a World Health Organization grant attempting to decrease their infant mortality because Zambia has one of the highest infant mortalities in the world.

So basically trying to teach skin-to-skin care, kangaroo care to the new moms.

However, with 185 babies a day, it's kind of like a really chaotic game of baseball with fetuses (laughs).

Yeah, so, you just, you pick up on the local travel languages really quickly.

You not necessarily go by the United States infection prevention standards, and, I mean,

I delivered, a lot, a lot, a lot of babies bare-handed.

Yeah, there aren't enough beds, there aren't enough rooms.

Moms deliver on staircases, in the halls, on the floors, on tarps, on cots.

I delivered a baby in a taxi once.

Yeah, it's chaos.