NIGHT NURSE TAKE TWO

For those of you wondering if we were able to recover from our calamitous night nurse the other night the answer is : yes.

I called the nursing agency and gave them hell the next day and they sent us one of their all-stars. The owner of the agency promised me that she would be awesome and she was.

Unfortunately my repeated good and bad experiences with nurses has made me increasingly prejudiced. I am loathe to admit such a thing but I can't help it; I like 'em young.

One would think that 30 years experience would be an asset to a profession such as nursing where the volume of knowledge needed is overwhelming.  Never mind the fact that some of my favorite nurses have loads of experience which just seems to make them better (my mom, my aunt).  But it's been the most consistent trait of the nurses that I have liked the most, they are young (by young I mean under 40) and they also tend to have small children of their own.  They are in the thick of it as much as we are and all of those mom reflexes and muscles are still in full effect.  Plus, and I know I am totally catering to stereotypes here, they learn how to use new equipment much faster.

The replacement nurse had all of these traits. She had never used the feeding pump before but she got it with a little bit of practice and reading the manual when she got stuck.  Lula slept well, but she did spit up at one point and the nurse gave her a nebulizer treatment but she didn't feel the need to wake us up.  We slept so well.

I called the agency the next day and confessed my bias.  I felt like the Hugh Hefner of night nurses, but they were totally cool with it.  I know I am going to hate myself for this one day when some 22 year old straight out of art school steals all my editing jobs and laughs at my computer skills and my complaints of lower back pain.  Both of our regular night nurses are young and have small kids and we are going to try to hang on to them for as long as we can, but when we do need a new nurse I am afraid that the senior set need not apply.