A quiet shift for L+M staff
All through the hospital barely a creature was stirring Christmas Day
New London — All year, Jeanne Wehling’s scrub top with the Santa Claus and gingerbread men pattern sits in a closet at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, waiting to be worn.
“This one, I really only wear Christmas or Christmas Eve,” she said. A coworker made it for her years ago, and once a year she pulls it out. On Monday afternoon, Wehling and Andrea Walker were a vision in red and green, standing together in the hallway of their unit at L+M and trading information about the patients there.
Walker’s scrubs featured a rednosed Rudolph and a few Christmas trees for good measure.
“They sit in the closet until it’s time,” Walker said.
The nurses were only two of the hospital employees for whom Monday was just another day at the office, made slightly more festive by the special scrubs, light-up necklaces and holiday greetings that surrounded them.
All but two of the department’s 30 rooms had patients in them Monday afternoon. Most lay quietly in their beds — some had family spending the day with them, some were alone and would only chat with the nurses on duty or their doctors.
According to their union contract, the nurses at L+M work every other holiday — if they were at work Monday, they won’t be working next Christmas.
“It’s nothing new,” said Olga Dimaggio, who will celebrate her 20-year work anniversary at L+M in July. “It’s not a regular nine-to-five. Somebody’s got to be here.”
“Merry Christmas,” a housekeeping employee said as she walked by
the nurses’ station, then disappeared around a corner. “I love to say Merry Christmas to everyone.”
The nurses’ break room was stocked with a mishmash of a holiday potluck, including Dimaggio’s stuffed cabbage, a sheet cake and Filipino spring rolls. The nurses had organized a Secret Santa gift-giving rotation this year, and on Christmas Eve a colleague serenaded them with a guitar.
“We make it fun,” Dimaggio said, touching a glow-inthe-dark necklace around her neck, one of a whole pack she brought in for all the nurses to share. “I think we try to make it as happy as we can.”
When she left work at 11:15 that night, Dimaggio planned to go home, eat dinner with her son, open presents and go to sleep. Anyway, she said, she comes from a family of Ukranian Catholics who traditionally celebrate Christmas during the first week of January.
Dimaggio will be working at the hospital then, too, she said.
The patients, though the hospital is likely the last place they want to be on Christmas, are usually appreciative of the festivities and that the nurses are there for them through the holiday. If their diet allows, patients can order prime rib to their rooms, not normally a staple of the hospital menu.
“I get a lot of ‘Merry Christmas,’” said Amy Jurczyk. Wearing her own Christmas-themed scrubs, Jurczyk sat at a computer typing until a bed alarm went off in a room at the corner of the unit. Briskly, she got up and helped the patient, then sat back down at the computer.
Jurczyk’s husband, who works on tugboats, was in Boston working over the holiday and wouldn’t be back for a week. Her parents usually host Christmas when everyone is around, she said, but have grown accustomed to her schedule.
“My mom still is sad about it, but she knows I’ll be there next year,” she said.
The nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit don’t hear holiday greetings from their patients — the three tiny infants being treated in the department Monday were quiet, squirming bundles under their blankets.
But a wall covered in Christmas cards from grateful parents and former colleagues was all the nurses there needed to keep them in good spirits.
“It’s so nice,” said Charlene Arsenault, gazing at the photos of teenagers who she had cared for as NICU patients.
The nurses made Christmas-themed hats and stockings for the infants, and laid out donated dinner and desserts for the infants’ parents on Christmas Eve. On Monday there were several hats left over: three babies unexpectedly had improved enough for their parents to take them home Monday, a Christmas gift.
“This is Mrs. Claus,” nurse Jill Brown said she told the parents of one baby on the phone. “I have a baby here that wants to go home.”