From the moment we were admitted, Emily treated us as though we were the only patients in the hospital. She had nothing but time and patience for us, and she was able to meet our needs and assuage our fears on every day of our stay - and of course, each day was quite different, moving from labor to recovery to parenting.
During our intake, a simple question about understanding postpartum depression, something that could have been addressed in a minute, became an opportunity for Emily to listen to our history of infertility, recurrent pregnancy loss, and struggling to reach this moment of delivering our first child. She got to know us as people, as parents, and as a family once our son was born, and because she took that time, she was able to meet all of our needs, even the ones we didn't see.
During labor, she could see and address my fears; during the first day of our son's life, she was quick to praise what we did well and equally quick to offer improvements to what we weren't perfect at. She spent a significant amount of time teaching me various holds for breastfeeding, which I think is the primary reason we have been so successful at nursing at home so far. When our son experienced minor bleeding after his circumcision, something that frightened and upset me as a new mother, she treated his body and my fears with the same swiftness, precision, and sense of calm, and she even encouraged me to be a part of his care at that moment. (It was a very technical matter of holding gauze, but it still involved me in my son's care.) In short, Emily helped make us a family during our stay, and we will always owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude for all of her care, physical and emotional.