Nurse Shannon Mirabella, left, checks on Tom Benjamin Sanford, Jr., as his daughter, Connie Simms watches Thursday in Erlanger’s ICU.As a nurse in the intensive care unit, Meghan Buffat always thought she empathized with her patients’ families.
Three times a day, she would watch them – the husbands and wives, the children and cousins – file into the unit to visit their sick and injured loved ones, trying to bring whatever bit of comfort they could to those hooked up to the tubes and machines.
Just 30 minutes later, they all would head back out again when the ICU’s doors closed.
It wasn’t until Buffat’s own baby, three months premature, fought for his life for 10 weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit that she really grasped what those families were going through.
But unlike the adult ICU she worked in, Buffat had more than 30 minutes with her son each day. She could freely visit him, day and night.