With each day bringing something new, pediatric nurse Dylan Dontanville never knows exactly what will greet him when he arrives to work at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.
Dontanville has been working at Cottage Children’s Medical Center since last August, and he previously worked at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles for nearly three years.
“I think what’s great about my job is every day is different,” Dontanville said. “Everything’s always changing. You never know what’s going to come in or what’s there waiting for me, so it’s exciting.”
While Dontanville said he didn’t necessarily always know he wanted to work in pediatric nursing, he said he took the job and it ended up being awesome.
“I love working with the kids. They are pretty incredible, and it’s really awesome to see them do really well,” Dontanville said. “I think it’s pretty cool that we get to not only take care of the patients, but we get to feed them, hold them, everything you really don’t get to do with adults.”
He also mentioned some other ways that pediatric nursing is different than working with adults.
For example, Dontanville said that he not only cares for the patient, but families are also considered their patients with the family-centered care practiced in the pediatric unit.
“They need all the same support that the patient does as well,” Dontanville said. “It’s an incredibly scary time for anybody when you’re in the ICU, no matter how severe it is. Just being there adds a level of anxiety and fear for everyone.”
Parents and families can be a big help in the child’s care, though, particularly with communication, Dontanville added.
“Parents truly know their kids best, and there are things that we’re able to teach them along the way to help care for their kids,” Dontanville said. “You can’t always communicate with our patients, or they can’t communicate with us. It’s really hard to know what a baby wants all the time or being with kids that are nonverbal, and you really have to rely on the parents because they know their kids best and they can help decipher the needs.”
While pediatric nursing differs greatly from working with adults, Dontanville said there can even be dramatic differences depending on the age of the child.
Cottage Children’s Medical Center sees patients from newborns and toddlers to older children and teenagers. Dontanville said they sometimes even care for young adults with chronic medical issues with a history of receiving care from Cottage Children’s Medical Center.
“That is also another challenge in that you can be taking care of a baby in one room and in the next room, you have a teenager. Everything’s different, the equipment’s different,” Dontanville said. “Even just what would be considered normal for a baby is not going to be normal for a teenager and figuring out how you’re going to give medications to a toddler versus a teenager — do you have to put on a show, or can they just take it? So, everything takes a little longer in pediatrics.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Dontanville said it was a very different experience from what he had been used to.
“It went from a hospital that was always full to not very full because the kids were not getting sick, at least at first, so that was different,” Dontanville said. “It was a challenging time, because I also felt kind of guilty — almost as if I wasn’t doing enough because I knew my friends who worked with adults were really just having a hard time and I was not.”
He added that when he did start seeing cases of COVID-19 in children, they were, for the most part, more mild cases.
Last winter, Cottage Health reported seeing an increase in respiratory syncytial virus in children, but Dontanville said that RSV cases haven’t been too bad recently.
“I think there’s still a lot of viruses out there that kids are coming in with,” Dontanville said. “I think the RSV seemed to hit a little bit earlier last year. We saw a lot in the summer, and it really kept going for quite a while. We’ve been pretty busy.”