If nothing
else during this labor and delivery, I’ve learned that events in our lives are
far beyond our earthly control. I never planned to get to know you. I planned
to spend my evening after delivery with my chubby baby lying on my chest with
her long legs folded up under her. I pictured her sweet daddy and I listening
to the rhythm of her breathing while we took an obscene number of cell phone pictures
and ate wheat thins and licorice from the vending machine. Instead we were
shaken to our core as we watched our ghastly white baby gasping for breath
while your team swept in and got to work, connecting breathing tubes and wires.
You were not in our plan and yet within moments you became the most important
people in our lives.
There are
plenty of people in the world who are effective at their jobs. There are people
who work hard and go unnoticed. There are people who do far less each day and
receive much more notoriety. Sometimes though, you meet people whose heart is so
buried in what they do for a living that being in their presence seems humbling.
During our
precious daughter’s stay in the NICU, we’ve seen you. We’ve watched you balance
rooms full of critical babies. Spending the day listening to a hundred
different beeps, discerning the urgent from the benign, keeping calm when an
urgent one has your heart racing. We’ve seen you decorate each baby’s bed with
sweet pink or blue accessories and personalized name tags. A gentle and personal
touch against a stark white backsplash of sterile and uniform. We’ve personally
experienced your compassion when you found a way to tenderly explain that while
we would be leaving the hospital empty-handed, our daughter would be cared for
just the same.
We’ve watched you while we scrubbed in, when you didn’t know we
were watching. We saw you delicately handle our daughter as if we were in the
room. You’ve
patiently helped a frustrated nursing mom bond with her baby and spent your
precious time moving, shifting and reattaching wires and cables so I could hold
her against the warmth of my chest, even just for a moment. A small gift for which I could never repay you.
No, we
certainly didn’t plan to get to know you. But as I sit here with my healthy
baby laying on my chest, her legs curled up underneath her, I hear her rhythmic
and even breathing, and I’m ever so grateful we did.
