Our infant had to spend their first week in the Special Care Nursery. While we received excellent care in both Labor and Delivery and the Special Care Nursery, our nurse Ali in the SCN really stood out to us. Ali took care of our infant for several nights in the nursery and she went above and beyond. Here are a few of the ways she did so:

She researched any topics that we were curious for more information about regarding things with our infant’s health to help us understand better. One example of that was looking up charts and explaining them to us.

The nurses had a sign made with our infant’s name on it to hang in their cube. One night Ali noticed that our infant’s onesie matched the colors and also had an elephant on them, so she took pictures of our infant with their sign. When we came in the next morning, she had a couple more pictures hanging up in our infant’s cube which helped make it feel a little more like home.

One of our hurdles to being discharged and going home was feeding away from the hospital nursery. We were trying breastfeeding and bottle feeding when we were not in the nursery. At that point, we were happy to have our infant eat whichever way they preferred so we could get home. On the nights Ali was working and we were not in the nursery for feedings, she would leave a sticky note in our infant’s bassinet with the amount of milk they drank from the bottle and if it had been time to weigh them, what their weight gain was. As I woke up to pump at night and checked the Angel Eye camera, I could see the progress our infant was making even while we weren’t there.

Every nurse cared for our infant in an amazing way, but Ali went above and beyond. She took the time to get to know us, and we were able to get to know her as well. While it wasn’t ideal for us to spend the first week of life in the hospital, she made our stay a little easier. Ali couldn’t be more deserving of this award!