Too Much Nurse

I am remembering two years ago today, Oct 30, 2010. The girl was 4 days old, and we had finally been transferred from the NICU to the family rooms in Intensive Care, with the expectation that we'd be going home soon. It was going to be our first night staying together as a family.

When regular babies are born, their parents take them home and they are all together from the get-go. We had a different kind of start, one that was strange, dramatic, stressful, scary and confusing. That's just how it is when you have a baby with complications. She was immediately whisked away and hooked up to monitors. I didn't even get to see her until hours later, and didn't get to hold her until the next day. We had to get permission from the nurses to handle our own child, and the nurses and their styles changed with every shift. It was frustrating.

So needless to say, we were so relieved to be finally able to be near her. She was still hooked up to monitors, and we weren't allowed to sleep with her, but we were able to feed her, hold her and love her, and be a family for the first time.

The evening shift change brought a new nurse. She was friendly and enthusiastic, and we thought we'd all get along just fine. This nurse was very diligent. She was in every hour, or even more often, to test A's vitals, which involved a bunch of unpleasant things like pricking her foot to check her iron, temperature under the armpit, weighing her, checking her oxygen, checking her food intake and just generally handling her.

Now, I'm no medical expert, but I'm pretty sure that's too much nurse. She would walk in at any time. I would have my shirt off pumping breastmilk or trying to nurse and she would just throw the door wide open without warning. She told us not to hold the baby, that if she needed to be held to call her. Really? The parents can't hold their own child? I don't think that's correct. I began to think she was a little obsessed and that put me ill at ease. Not a lot of sleep or bonding that night, for any of us, needless to say.

I did finally lay down and rested about midnight. I was at peace for about 45 minutes when the door comes flying right open. It was my favorite nurse. I pretended not to wake up, but she came right over to my face and said to me "Look, I'm a cat!". The clock strikes midnight on Halloween and the place goes nuts, I guess. She was lucky I didn't punch her in her cat neck.

What could have been a nice peaceful night was a total nightmare and I was edgy and irritable, but totally happy when the shift changed again. The morning nurse did her job, and gave us space. She also got us discharged from the hospital!

We took our sweet baby girl home on Halloween 2010, and we have never looked back, except for some un-fond memories of a particularly bizarre nurse experience.