I would love to say that I chose to go into nursing because of the stellar care Azaria and I received during my pregnancy and her 8 weeks with us but it was actually because of the opposite. 

You see when I had her I was a young African American mother on Medicaid. Tyrone was young as well and we were not married. 

There were some comments during this period of my life that I will never forget like the time I went in for a routine OB appointment at the high risk office and the provider looked at my chart then to me and asked me in a stern voice why I was going through with the pregnancy when I knew she was going to die, or the time when Azaria was in the PICU recovering from her open heart surgery and we asked why her chest was still open- and the male nurse joked that her guts could come flying out.

Or even the time when Azaria was moved to the regular pediatric floor and she started making a funny noise I had never heard before ( I know now that noise was called grunting and a sign of distress) I had gone out to the nurses station several times to try to get a nurse to come check on her-they kept telling me that babies make noises and kept blowing me off until I demanded them come stating something wasn’t right- the nurse finally came in and quickly left and a minute later the PICU team was whisking my baby away. 

No one would tell us what was going on or her condition until hours later when a resident on the team said “well we almost lost her”. I remember asking Tyrone at the time if all parents were treated like this or just us.

During her whole life we didn’t get a lot  of pictures because we didn’t have much money and were using most of our money at the time to pay for the hospital’s parking so we could visit our daughter. Not one nurse referred us to the social worker so we could get a parking pass ( I didn’t know there was such a thing until after she had died). 

There was one moment of sunshine though after she died. After her death I received cards, even some from total strangers but it was one card that was so sweet that I will always remember and it did come from someone who cared for our daughter while in the hospital- a nursing student who had cared for Azaria during one of her clinicals wrote me the sweetest card stating how precious Azaria was to her and that she was so sorry. That act of kindness meant so much at the time️

When I decided to go into nursing it was so people would not be treated like we were no matter there situation- I wanted to be an advocate for my patients.