In an amazing surprise, January ended with the return of a someone who is, and will always be, near and dear to the Topliff family collective heart. Debbie was one of the nurses on duty for the days and hours leading up to Grace’s less-than-graceful entrance into the world. She was the strike nurse (remember there was a nursing strike during the whole ordeal) whose name we most looked forward to when shifts changed. She was the one on duty when all Hell broke loose in Labor and Delivery. She is easily in the handful of people that are credited with saving Jenn and Grace. She is the one who “pushed the Epi” that stopped the spiraling in and started the much less scary part of the birth. She was one of the few non-family members we had hold Grace in the NICU. In fact, this is the last time she saw Grace (other than Facebook, of course):
When Jenn heard that another nursing strike was bringing Debbie back to the Bay Area, she opened her schedule and kept Grace out of school for an impromptu breakfast reunion. I imagine there were a lot of happy and scary-memory tears. Debbie is a great person to remind us of what a miracle baby Grace is, because she was there and she knows how these things CAN end. We know we have a lot to be grateful for, including Debbie herself, of course.
In addition to being an amazing nurse, Debbie is a military wife and therefore mostly-single mother while her husband, Brent, is deployed in Afghanistan. We don’t get to see her often, but we keep up through her prolific Facebook posting and hope he comes home safe and sound and soon! Send a happy thought out to the Cooks when you read this.