I sit here in my new house, half unpacked, with 9 furry children in a
bedroom upstairs, a dog by my side, a cat in the basement chilling on
the futon, and think about my next few days and what they will entail.
 
Friday night I'll go to work, my car loaded with gifts given by myself
and a few other nurses at work for a patient's family I've cared for 3-4
nights a week for the last 4 months.  Tomorrow this baby will turn 4
months old.  Her family-mom is 23, dad is about the same age, her sister
is 3 years old.  Mom lost her own mother in April.  The baby was born
premature, had bad brain bleeds, perfed her gut, and has not been doing
well to say the least.  One of the dayshift nurses who has cared for her
just as much as I have asked me one day a week or so ago what I thought
about adopting her family for Christmas.  I said I thought that was a
great idea.  You see, this baby, if she lives anywhere past the two more
months we're predicting she will have, will be severely handicapped-a
"vegetable".  She will not have any quality of life.  Her mom knows this
and sits by, talks to the neurosurgeons, knows that things aren't going
to get better, and wants to wait for an MRI to decide what to do.  This
is fine with me.  I would hope that knowing what I know, I wouldn't do
this to my own child, that I would have the strength to take her off of
life support.  But given this mother's age, her previous loss of the
closest person to her-her mother, and now a baby who isn't doing well,
coupled with the fact that she has to be strong for her three year old
daughter, I don't know what I would do.  This mom has been nasty on
occassion to say the least, she's a fighter.  I had the baby the first
night she came to our unit.  Mom got nasty with me, I didn't get nasty
back, but I did push back.  With an inner city population, sometimes you
have to push back to get them to respect you.  We've done this twice, and
she loves me for some reason.  We told her we were "adopting her family"
for christmas, would she make a list of things she thought her daughter
would like, as well as her and Dad.  We got the list, and we've gotten
most of the things on the list.  I'm so grateful to be able to give them
a nice Christmas, maybe not a happy one, but I hope that knowing that
other people care about them so much makes their day a little brighter.
So Saturday morning when I leave work, I will be driving to their house
to drop off these gifts as they have no car and can't take everything
home on the bus.
 
Then I will go to Heavenly Ham and pick up the Christmas dinner I ordered
for my in-laws and my mother for our first Christmas as a married couple,
in our home that we only moved into last week.  That night, I will
celebrate Christmas at church with my in-laws, and Sunday afternoon
everyone will be coming to our home for dinner.  At my house I will
have all of my children (all furry), my in-laws, my brother and
sister-in-laws, and their two children who we love so much and my
mother, and we'll have a nice meal.
 
I am so thankful to have all that I have this Christmas, and I don't
think I'm normally this grateful.  But this year thinking about all fo
the soldiers and their families who aren't together, all of the families
that were torn apart by Katrina, all of the families whose loved one are
ill or dying...So many of our staff members this year lost husbands,
parents, and one lost their infant son.  Oh I am lucky, so very lucky to
have what I do.  The only thing I'm missing is my little sister who is
out in Oregon this year with her girlfriend and now they are breaking up.
My sister probably won't have as nice a Christmas and for that I am sad.
For everything else I have, I am blessed.
 
I hope everyone has a nice Christmas and remembers what they do have to
be grateful for.  Merry Christmas to all of you.
 
Jennifer
[Posted in FML issue 5100]