Sara Scharfenberg
October 2018
Sara
Scharfenberg
,
RN
Neonatal ICU
OSF Saint Francis Medical Center
Peoria
,
IL
United States
What a blessing it was to have Sara. We had Sara as our nurse for the day as well as the nurse who helped our baby go home on hospice. As O's nurse, she greets us with a smile and with just a sense of joy. You could tell just in the way that she interacted with us that she just loves people and genuinely loved our baby. She had only just met all of us, but she showed immense amounts of kindness towards us. She helped us to feel like a family in the middle of having a NICU baby. She encouraged us to do all that we could with him even with the cords and the monitors. She helped us to feel like we were just for a moment able to create a "new normal" as a family and we didn't have all the chaos of splitting time and energy between home and the hospital.
Sara also assisted our family in another way that I will never forget. The night that we decided to take O home on hospice, Sara happened to be the transport nurse that night and was able to assist us. Her and I both wish that it was under different circumstances that she was assisting our family, but I was grateful all the same. When we decided to bring O home on hospice he was still hooked up to an EEG. I wanted him to have a bath and all that glue out of his hair. I wanted to have a "baby", not a science experiment (or so it felt like). Sara stayed an hour past her shift to help me give O a swaddled bath to scrub all the glue out of his hair so that I could take him home without all the mess of being in the hospital. To her, it may have seemed like only an hour, but the fact that she was willing to give up her time for me and my baby meant the world to me. A simple bath where we scrubbed and scrubbed glue off my baby's head is seriously something that I will never forget. It was a selfless act of love that will be a story that my family tells forever. I will never forget her kindness and willingness to love my family well and in any way that she could. Anyone who has Sara as the nurse for their baby should feel overwhelmingly blessed because this woman is the best of the best!
Sara also assisted our family in another way that I will never forget. The night that we decided to take O home on hospice, Sara happened to be the transport nurse that night and was able to assist us. Her and I both wish that it was under different circumstances that she was assisting our family, but I was grateful all the same. When we decided to bring O home on hospice he was still hooked up to an EEG. I wanted him to have a bath and all that glue out of his hair. I wanted to have a "baby", not a science experiment (or so it felt like). Sara stayed an hour past her shift to help me give O a swaddled bath to scrub all the glue out of his hair so that I could take him home without all the mess of being in the hospital. To her, it may have seemed like only an hour, but the fact that she was willing to give up her time for me and my baby meant the world to me. A simple bath where we scrubbed and scrubbed glue off my baby's head is seriously something that I will never forget. It was a selfless act of love that will be a story that my family tells forever. I will never forget her kindness and willingness to love my family well and in any way that she could. Anyone who has Sara as the nurse for their baby should feel overwhelmingly blessed because this woman is the best of the best!