We had our firstborn son at Rush with a very smooth delivery and discharge process home. Fast forward four days to our routine pediatrician follow-up appointment - long story short, what we thought was going to be a quick outpatient bilirubin check and return home quickly escalated to our baby needing to be taken to the Emergency Department and eventually the NICU.

As new parents, we were terrified, anxious, and paranoid about our boy and his prognosis - we were in significant emotional and mental distress from the moment we walked into the ED.

We met Kelcey Hernandez when our son was being transported from the ED to the NICU - she was assigned to be our son's nurse in the NICU, and we are so incredibly grateful to have had her watching over our boy.

It was obvious from the start that Kelcey was a seasoned NICU nurse whom we could very much trust to take care of our son. However, what really stood out to us about Kelcey was that beyond her medical training, she was incredibly empathetic and understood the stress and fear that we as new parents had with a new baby in the NICU.

Kelcey went out of her way to make sure both of us were comfortable, informed, and active participants in our son's plan of care. Her empathy and attention to us as parents was an incredibly pleasant, calming presence that truly made this whole situation much more bearable for us.

This also happened to be over Easter weekend for our baby's first holiday - after seeing our baby's mother in distress, Kelcey went out of her way to get some footprints of our son and turned them into a beautiful Easter card that quickly turned our tears of sadness and fear into peace and calm. There were little things like this that really made the difference, and there were numerous other situations like this throughout the course of our stay.

Kelcey was not assigned to our son the following day on her next shift, but countless times she continued to stop in our room to check on our boy, help with changing/feeding even when she knew we were capable of doing so ourselves just to take some pressure off of us and help us stay as relaxed as possible, make pleasant conversation, ensure all of our questions or needs were being addressed, and make sure we were okay as new parents and felt as comfortable as possible during quite literally the most terrifying and stressful few days of our lives.

All of the staff in the NICU have been exceptional - we have high praise across the board for every member of our son's team - but Kelcey went way above and beyond her job description and really became a primary source of peace for us as parents to calm our psychological storm and keep a positive attitude throughout such a negative situation.

She educated us in a kind, professional manner and spent as much time as we needed answering questions about virtually everything involving our son.

We are so incredibly lucky to have had Kelcey be a part of our son's care team and are so very blessed and grateful for the time and energy she spent making sure that not just our boy was OK, but us as parents as well.

Any patient in the care of Kelcey Hernandez is a very lucky patient indeed, and we sincerely hope she gets recognition for her exemplary care.