March 2024
Michaela
Jordan
,
BSN, RN
L&D
NewYork Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital
NY
,
NY
United States
She asked us about ourselves, offered to answer questions, and showed the deep empathy of someone who had been in health care for a lifetime.
My wife and I were expecting our first child and ended up with an induction that left her laboring overnight. The first set of nurses were wonderful and knowledgeable, but as the night shift began, we were left with Michaela as our main contact. We needed continuous heart rate monitoring for the entirety of the labor to ensure no issues with fetal heart rate. This meant we saw Michaela often as she came and moved the monitors around my wife. She asked us about ourselves, offered to answer questions, and showed the deep empathy of someone who had been in health care for a lifetime. At some point, I asked how long she had been doing this work and was floored to find out she was relatively new to L&D and this hospital. When contractions began to get difficult, she was there to help my wife move around the room. She helped us through the epidural and collected me from the waiting room with kind words. Again, we acknowledge that we were getting top care from a team of nurses and doctors, but Michaela's going off shift in the morning almost caused us a bit of panic. Our evening of labor, of nerves, and of an unexpectedly early induction was handled by her warm care. Perhaps the expectation at NY Presbyterian is 12 straight hours of kind, patient, and quality care from a single person managing two nervous first-timers. But we didn’t know to expect that, and we’ve written her into our birth story as our favorite nurse.