Today I ran into a Mexican restaurant to grab a quick lunch, and as I ate my meal I came across a table of nurses wearing hospital scrubs. As they chatted amongst themselves I thought about the many nurses my family has interacted with over the last five years, and I found myself filled with such appreciation for what these amazing women and men do for us.
It was in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit that I initially saw how amazing nurses can be. My first child, Maddie, had been born almost 12 weeks premature, and the hospital staff, upon determining that Maddie's lungs were immature, rushed her to the NICU. There Maddie's life hung in the balance, and though my wife, Heather, and I longed to care for her ourselves, her condition made it so that we couldn't. We had to trust the NICU nurses to take care of our baby for us, and that was incredibly hard — especially at night when we went home to catch a few hours sleep.
Sleeping was, of course, almost impossible. My sick baby was not with me, and the phone loomed ominously on the nightstand. If it rang before dawn it would do so for only one reason — to tell us that Maddie had passed away. I can't tell you how scared I was of that phone ringing. Thankfully, it never did.
Each morning I called the NICU at 7:00 a.m. to get an update from the night nurse about how Maddie had done through the night, and the moments waiting for her to pick up the phone were horrible. Was I going to hear Maddie had done poorly and that things didn't look good? Or, if the nurse took a long time to come to the phone, did that mean that she and the other medical staff were desperately fighting to stabilize Maddie at that very moment (something I'd witnessed in person a number of horrible times)? My hands never failed to shake as I waited for the phone to be picked up.
Once the night nurse picked up, though, I began to feel better. She always told us about Maddie's night in great detail even though she'd just finished a long, exhausting shift. The lengths the NICU nurses went for Maddie were incredible. One night, we were told, Maddie wouldn't respond to the ventilator, and the only reason she survived was because the night nurses took turns hand pumping air into her lungs for hours on end until their hands were cramped and throbbing.