PICU Wasteland
- By Lisa Sieczkowski
- 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
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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.