A Long Overdue Post on Our Nurses

The boys had a really good day today. They were on room air for most of the day and are both tolerating their feeds. Charlie's echo came back negative for infection and showed his PDA has gotten smaller. It was just a day filled with good news and a feeling we are finally, at long last moving forward instead of falling behind.  

When victories like this happen they are shared first with a group of women I am growing closer to by the day; the nurses at TCH. This group of women (and one man) are some of the hardest working, caring and dedicated people I have met.  The nurses are the reason I can leave at night with full confidence that my children are in the best hands possible. The nurses we have met have held my hand literally and figuratively through what has been, without a doubt, the hardest experience of my life. I am amazed daily at how calm and cool under pressure they are when faced with emergent situations. They have to navigate the tricky world of dealing with doctors that sometimes don't listen, parents who are overwhelmed and emotional and patients who can't tell them what hurts or what is wrong. Nobody knows my babies better than our nurses. Their insight into how Charlie and Henry are has proven invaluable. We have picked primary nurses over in the tower now and like the primaries we picked over in The Pavilion, these women have become my babies' front line protection. They watch my babies all day and notice that Charlie's breathing is a bit too labored for their comfort or Henry's heart rate has been really low for too long. They notice it and they take action. Action that saves my babies from being in pain or getting sicker.  I am so grateful that we have such an amazing nursing staff to guide us through this horrible maze we are caught in. Nurses just don't get enough credit for everything they do. Our nurses multi-task with a grace that is powerful to watch and I'm in awe of them every day. They have so much work to do between charting, patient care, charting some more, talking to drs, the pharmacy, the milk bank, parents and countless other tasks on their checklist each day. I have seen some of my favorite nurses be talked down to and dismissed by doctors (guess which speciality) and it infuriates me.  Yet they carry on with what they are doing, ignoring the rudeness. In other professions this wouldn't be allowed, yet nurses somehow just have to take it. I've seen nurses catch mistakes that would have otherwise go unnoticed and I've noticed this quite a few times. Our nurses are smart as whip and think outside the box and go above and beyond. So thank you to all our nurses who miss time with their families on the weekends and holidays, who stay late to chart, who come over to the tower to see us, who, even if they don't have our boys that day come over to check on us anyway.  Thank you for doing what you do. You will never know how much it has meant to our family.

(A)