Aria's nurses

At the hospital, nurses work in 12 hour shifts meaning that Aria has had dozens of different nurses in her short life!  We have really loved the nurses in general but there are definitely a few that stand out.

Aria has what is called a "primary nurse."  Actually, she has two of them.  If a family really likes a particular nurse, they can request that the nurse become their primary nurse, meaning that every time that nurse works they are assigned to that particular baby.  While we liked the idea of that, we had kind of decided not to request any particular nurse for Aria because she has such a terrible prognosis.  We didn't feel like that was fair to ask a nurse to take her on knowing that she wouldn't see any improvement.  It's hard enough for us, we didn't want to do that to someone else.

Three weeks ago, we went to visit Aria and met nurse J for the first time.  We really liked her, but were floored when she told us she had requested to become Aria's primary nurse.  She had made the request after only one shift with Aria!  Of course we said yes - we explained our reasons for not requesting a primary, and J basically said she understood Aria's prognosis and wanted her anyway because she was such a sweet little thing.  We were thrilled!  We couldn't even be upset that the whole reason we had gone at that time was to give Aria her bath, and J had already done it earlier just because she likes giving babies baths!  Adorable.  The more people who can love Aria the better.  I have really become so dependent on J.  Today she told me that she just loves Aria so much so she can't even imagine how much I love her.  She has just been amazing and is our stable rock at the hospital since the NPs and Attending doctors change regularly according to the rotation schedule.

Her other primary nurse M did the same thing - made the request herself.  We actually were familiar with her because she had been assigned to Aria several times before.  Since her request went through second, if her and J are ever on shift at the same time then J will be assigned to Aria.  M is quite young, pretty newly married it seems, and is just totally an open book.  I really like her but am definitely nervous on her behalf because she definitely hasn't had as much experience as J with babies with bad outcomes.  So I'm hoping she can handle this okay.  We definitely love both our nurses though.  I'm never worried about Aria when one of them is on shift.