My wife and I were expecting our first child. Obviously, we were extremely excited and spent months and months planning. We created our birth plan, took labor classes, bought all the things that we needed for postpartum care. My wife started having contractions about a month early. While she had been having some contractions for a while during her pregnancy, she noticed that these were different.
At 4 am we went to the hospital to see what we should do as our boy was breech and it would not be safe to deliver vaginally. We were told the news very early in the day that she would need to have a Cesarean section. We were disappointed but all we wanted was to deliver a healthy boy. The delivery went well; he was born at 36 weeks and 5 days and immediately fell in love. When we visited the PACU, everything looked good except for our son's blood sugar. We were told to keep an eye on this and relayed this information to our nurse on 4H. When the nurse came in to check his blood sugar, it was extremely low. She made the call to transfer our son to the NICU. My wife was in tears, nervous, scared, and exhausted. She had just had surgery, and now they were taking our son away from us.
This is when we met Nurse Keeley. When we arrived at the NICU we were blown away by the professionalism, efficiency, and knowledge of the entire staff. Keeley, as our main nurse, took charge and set our mind at ease. She connected with us as the parents of her patient and assured us that we were in good hands. Watching her work with our son made us feel content with leaving him away from his mother. From the moment we met Keeley, we knew that everything would be okay. She assessed him and knew the best plan for care. She was able to talk to my wife rationally through her tears and assured her that the blood sugar would increase with the dietary supplements and regimen that she would institute. This was the assurance and bedside manner that allowed my wife to feel comfortable with leaving our 6-hour old son alone with a stranger.
Since I did not need care, I stayed with our son throughout the night. I got to know Keeley and the other nurses well and was so thankful for their knowledge and expertise. As a new dad, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Keeley was the perfect nurse for our family. She showed us proper feeding technique, best practices for bottles, how to swaddle him perfectly, the most comfortable ways to bathe him and so much more. She even took the time to show love to my wife and connect with us as a family. While she was only treating our son, she was able to help our family heal together from a hectic first day in the hospital. She was the best nurse we could have ever asked for. Even though we were only one of her 3 patients that day I felt that she was attending to us exclusively because of her knowledge of our son's situation and the time she took out of her schedule to care for him and make us feel safe. And in a hospital, isn't that you want from your nurses?