Lauren exemplified what a nurse should be in all aspects. She showed such a compassionate and tender heart towards my wife and me and more importantly towards our daughter which meant the world to us.
After she had finished up her job, or dealing with an issue our daughter was having, she took extra time to just get to know us and our daughter on more of a personal level. Lauren helped encourage us on the rough days when our daughter wasn't doing the best and celebrated with us on the good days. You could tell she was almost as excited about our daughter's good days as we were.
Out of all the things Lauren did to be a great nurse in our eyes from helping us get meal cards for the cafeteria due to our unplanned extended stay to having us talk to the social worker about us not being able to afford to stay in the hotel we were in any longer due to us not having an extended stay planned in our budget which led to the hospital paying for a week of our hotel stay so we could continue to stay in the hotel and not have to sleep in one of the sleep rooms that wasn't guaranteed.
All of this came about because of the general conversations that she had with us in just getting to know us. She made it a point to make sure she kept us informed with what was going on when my wife and I felt like things came to a standstill with the plans of progression in getting our daughter better. On several occasions she went and hunted the doctors to ask them questions we had so we didn't have to wait until rounds later on in the day. But out of all the above and beyond things that she did the one thing that sticks the most out to me and will be one of things I will remember her by is one day after she gave our daughter a bath she asked us if we cared if she did our daughters hair. We told her go for it. So she took it upon herself and tracked down a hair tie which ended up being her own personal hair tie and put our daughter's hair up in a hair tie and a beret. She was so excited about it. It showed me her heart and the love she has for being a nurse.
Sometimes it's the littlest gestures that mean the most. To me in this case it was the hair tie. The fact that she cared enough about our daughter to give her her own personal hair tie so our daughter's hair would look cute was one of the most meaningful and special things I have ever seen a nurse do. My wife and I came to hope our daughter had her as her nurse each morning. We were very blessed to be able to have her as our daughter's nurse.
Literally every single question we had each day our daughter had her as her nurse Lauren was either able to answer our questions or she went and got the answer or brought the person who did know the answer to our daughter's room to answer the question for us then after that person left she made sure we understood the answer. She didn't believe in waiting around for a person to come along that would know the answer she went and sought the people out and got us answers as soon as she could. I would say that is definitely one of the things that made my wife and I love having her as our daughter's nurse. She let us know what kind of help we had available to us while we were here that we didn't know about which relieved literally half of the stress we were under. I don't think she will ever know how much that meant to us.
From the first time our daughter had Lauren as her nurse she showed us respect by not viewing our daughter like she was just another patient. She showed that she genuinely cared about her. Her ability to do her job and did it very well and demonstrated it every day. Those things alone helped us feel comfortable and allowed us to put a lot of trust in her and in what she had to say. She spoke highly of fellow coworkers that we didn't know and reassured us that those people knew what they were doing which allowed us to trust them off of what her opinion of them was which helped out a lot on a couple occasions.