Southern Comfort

I'll warn you up front, this blog may be a little heavy on the Shauna and lighter on the mommy/Natalia thing. It was a rough week at the office.

Okay, think back to when your little angel (they are always sweet and perfect in hind sight) was smaller and she had her comfort object. Natalia has had a few, but nothing that she had to take with her everywhere she went. I do remember her being around two months old and me crying in the pediatricians office to the nurse because Natalia would nurse almost constantly and I was so tired. The nurse lovingly took Natalia from my arms so I could have a mini melt down and told me "Hon, she's not eating, she's just using you as a pacifier." She would never take to the plastic kind and constantly having her attached to me was no longer an option. The gig was up, but she had me going for a while.

Besides Natalia's bedtime friends Slippin' Booty (okay, I'm making fun of her toddler mispronunciation of Sleeping Beauty) and John Bear, her other tried and true soother is hair. Specifically my hair. When I would hold her over my shoulder and she was either upset or ready to conk out, she would reach over my shoulder, around my neck and rub my hair between her thumb and fingers. Although it seems like eons ago, I used to be able to pick her up while she was sleeping without herniating a disc and unconscious and all, she would still reach her little hand behind my neck to rub my hair. She simply cannot resist playing with my bangs when we are having an eye level "coming to Jesus meeting" about something important and when she is sleeping and my hair isn't available, she rubs her own bangs. She wakes up with this little Treasure Troll looking tuft of hair in the front sometimes. Too cute. Aah, comfort.

Like I said, I had a super, five miles horrible bad day at the office. Now because I am a nurse and because I have to keep my patient's confidentiality, I can't go into specifics. I'll do as much dancing around the details as I can to respect her privacy and keep my job.

My patient was mean to me. Now, I have been in an ER for seven years now and people are mean to me all the time. It's okay, I can take it. Like I said to one of my co-workers that day "At least I don't work on the floor where I would have her for 12 hours, three days a week." The plan was for her to be admitted if I could only get the order for a bed upstairs. In the meantime, she had fired me as her nurse several times (which I told her was not an option), been on the call light at least every twenty minutes or so, was demanding, degrading, tried to pick fights multiple times, spent her entire ER stay yelling and screaming and loudly had been calling me some very unlady-like names. I realized about five hours into her stay that she needed comfort that she was never going to get through and IV, so I prayed at her bedside. My prayers are pretty much how I talk to y'all because it seems silly to put on a front for God. I don't know if you know this, but He reads minds! Crazy, right?! This was my prayer: "God, this woman is horrible and mean, but sad. Please give her some comfort. She's still horrible. Amen." Hey. I am who I am.

Of course she didn't know I was praying about her. I mean, how could she? She was too busy asking me if I was a sadist who enjoyed seeing people in pain. I did the best I could to make her content. Of course it didn't work, but I did my part. Unfortunately she died suddenly and unexpectedly. There are a lot more details to this story, but trust me that this was devastating enough. In my seven years of nursing I have never walked in on a patient who was dead that I had just checked on fifteen minutes before. I'm not talking "circling the drain" or agonal. This woman was dead. She finally got her comfort, so I guess God was listening after all.

As you could well imagine, I needed some comfort. There was no way I could keep it together on this one. I have amazing co-workers who helped me clean up the mess, sort out my other patients and take over while I left the floor to sit on the curb outside in the ambulance bay. The patient's admitting doctor came out, sat with me and gave me reassurance and a big hug. That was comforting, but what I needed was Natalia's equivalent of hair rubbing. That would be My Jeremy. I called him and told him I needed him to come to the hospital because when my world is falling apart, he steadies me. He got there like my black knight all in uniform, hugged me and helped me recap things in a logical way rather than my hysterical Shauna crazy-pants state I was in. I made it through the rest of my shift that day (barely) and Jeremy took the rest of his shift off so he could meet me at home with flowers and a cheeseburger.

Earlier that day, way before all this drama, I had a sweet patient that I actually enjoyed talking to. We got on the subject of kids and how her one regret is that her son is an only child and has no siblings to comfort him when she and her husband are gone. Ugh! The singleton guilt. It comes around every once in a while, but after Saturday night I have a different perspective. Given Natalia isn't some sort of a social leper, she will be just fine. If God gifts her even half the quality of amazing people that have surrounded me since my no good, horrible, very bad day, she will be comforted. Family is what you make it. It may be a dear friend who's hair she plays with when I am sick or gone, or maybe she will have an amazing husband with longer hair. Although I don't know how I feel about that. I'm kind of partial to men with short hair. Whatever the case, I feel really sad for the patient who had no one there to comfort her, but I am thankful for all the loving people I have around me. I have to give a special thank you and shout out to Christine, Amy C. and Kelly - oh, and My Jeremy, of course.