Dear nurse,

Dear Nurse,

Thank you for wrapping my babies snugly in warm blankets and presenting them to me like sweet-smelling gifts.

Thank you for coaching me through the labor that brought them into this world.

Thank you for answering a million questions and chuckling gamely at nerve-inspired jokes I’m sure you’d heard a thousand times before.

Thank you for ever-so-gently washing my sister’s blood-sticky hair after brain surgery and then helping her fill out her March Madness pool.

Thank you for allowing my mother in-law to exit this world in the same dignified manner she lived in it.

Thank you for staying late to read charts and make phone calls.

Thank you for keeping my daughter safe and warm until I could get to her.

Thank you for those quick, efficient needle sticks that sent life-preserving vaccinations into our bloodstreams.

Thank you for holding my arm when I shattered my elbow and couldn’t move it.

Thank you for letting me get on the scale backwards when I didn’t want to know what it said.

Thank you for not rolling your eyes when I showed up for my physical all sweaty and gross because I had jogged to my appointment. (That was a tactical error I never repeated).

Thank you for keeping my kids calm through their stitches, concussions and surgeries.

Thank you, especially, to my sister in-law Melissa, my friends Pretty Nurse Karen, Jan, Connie, Julie and anyone else I will be horrified to have forgotten.

Thank you nurses and Happy National Nurses Week! You are more valued than you know.