October 2023
Julie
Laurenzi
,
RN
Maternity
Southwest General Healthcare Center
Middleburg Heights
,
OH
United States
We are so unbelievably grateful to Julie for her attention to detail that she noticed something everyone else, ourselves included, had missed.
My son was born via C-section for breech. He was a preemie, coming five weeks early, so he was sent immediately to the special care nursery. He was given a chest x-ray upon admission to the NICU, which was read as unremarkable. He was then monitored by many nurses, PT, OT, and ourselves while we were there during the day. We changed his diapers, changed his clothes, gave him baths, etc. Two weeks after he was born, we received a call at home from the NICU that our night nurse, Julie Laurenzi, had noticed during her assessment that one of his thighs was considerably larger than the other. Upon measuring, she found that his right thigh was 4 cm larger in diameter than the left. After getting an x-ray, it was discovered that our son had had a right femur fracture since birth. We were shocked to discover that it was also present on the initial chest x-ray that he was given on admission. Had it not been for the bradycardia episodes, we may have taken him home with a femur fracture we knew nothing about. We are so unbelievably grateful to Julie for her attention to detail that she noticed something everyone else, ourselves included, had missed. After determining that he would need to be transferred to Rainbow, she was wonderful. She seemed just as heartbroken as we were for our poor little boy. She supported me while I was inconsolable and packed up everything we had in our NICU room after having spread out during our two-week stay. I will be forever grateful to Julie Laurenzi. Of all of the wonderful people who work at Southwest, because we genuinely did receive great care, I will never forget Julie Laurenzi.