
PICU Wasteland
- By Lisa Sieczkowski
- October 29, 2021
- visuals
- One Comment

About the Artwork
“Our children’s hospital recently moved several patient units into a new hospital tower, leaving behind empty rooms filled with unused equipment. Great joys and great sorrows have occurred in these rooms, so hastily abandoned, where a squadron of IV poles stand guard like silent sentinels.”
Lisa Sieczkowski is a pediatric hospitalist and residency program leader in Middle America who has a keen interest in medical humanities and loves searching for beauty amid the absurdity.
Comments
More Visuals


Community
Johanna Siegmann
January 20, 2023

Two Bodies
Isabella Calisi-Wagner
January 6, 2023

COVID Remapped
Megan Gerber
December 23, 2022

Ultimate Concern
Buddy Marterre
December 9, 2022

A Child by Any Other Name Would Be as Loved
Lisa Sieczkowski
November 25, 2022

The Toll of It All
Brian R. Smith
November 11, 2022

The Domino Players
Richard Heley
October 28, 2022

Valiant
Tim Roberts
October 14, 2022

Intuitive Eating
Florence J. Yip
September 30, 2022
1 thought on “PICU Wasteland”
Seeing these generationally different “tools” (standard IV poles vs. modern somatic oxygenation monitors), brought to mind 2 simple truths expressed to me by a colleague a number of years ago: “In the modern ICU, we make technology, even life-support technology, just look like a piece of the furniture. And, when one doesn’t work, we just pull a different one out of the closet.” Of course, at times these things make it less than obvious to parents how critically ill their child may be – leaving us with the responsibility to communicate as persons and not mere technicians.