An Open Letter to our NICU Nurses

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.