Page 4 of Christmas On Call
Max hit the floor with a renewed sense of confidence, arms brimming with holiday contraband. The old nurse’s trick was to walk quickly and look a little frazzled—no one stopped you if you seemed like you were already late to something important. She passed a group of residents with their noses buried in iPads and dodged an incoming bed transport whose occupant had that post-op glaze of relief and terror.
Back in the NICU, the war for Christmas was well underway. Max set her load down at the command post (also known as the nurses’ station) and surveyed her commanders: Juliette, whose hair was a different shade of pink every week, and Martha, the steady night shift veteran who’d seen more Christmases in pediatrics than she cared to count.
“All right, elves,” Max said, “time to turn this place from a prison into the inside of a snow globe. You, glitter patrol.” She pointed Juliette to the stack of paper snowflakes. “You, string up these lights so we don’t trip a circuit and get murdered by Facilities.” She tossed Martha the twinkle lights and the hospital-approved mounting tape.
Martha eyed the box. “Oh jeez. You do know Dr. Patel’s gonna stroke out if she sees these on her monitors.”
“She’ll survive. I need this Christmas spirit! We all do,” Max said. “She’s got good blood pressure; she can handle it.” Max pulled out her phone and queued up a playlist—nothing loud, just the gentle, instrumental kind that could pass for background hum if you didn’t listen too closely.
It was mostly silent work. The beeps and pings of the unit laid down their usual rhythm, and the only other sound was the occasional soft laugh as someone found a particularly ridiculous snowflake (“Who made this one, a deranged elf?” Juliette said,holding it aloft). Max worked quickly, taping a red stocking to each isolette, threading garland through the safety rails, careful not to block any access ports or monitor lines. This was a labor of love, but it was also a calculated art. Cheer, but not clutter; comfort, but never in the way.
A mother sat in pod 2, hunched over a paperback, but not reading, just staring at the same page, eyes darting every few seconds to the fragile bundle inside the incubator. Max recognized the look. She’d seen it on her own face, years ago, in the mirror after her father’s heart attack: the tightwire hope that if you watched someone hard enough, you could keep them tethered to earth.
Max hovered near, not wanting to intrude, but then she spotted the note taped to the incubator: “Baby Rodriguez.” A boy, born at 28 weeks, already a fighter but still blue around the fingernails. His parents had slept in the waiting area for the last two nights, trading shifts for the cot and the vending machine.
“Hey,” Max said, crouching down so her eyes were level with the mother’s. “He had a good night. Stats are up. If he keeps this up, you’ll be home before the next snowstorm.”
The mother’s lips trembled, and for a second Max thought she might break. Instead, she clutched the hand sanitizer bottle and nodded, blinking fast. “I just want to hold him,” she whispered.
“We’ll get there,” Max promised, and she meant it.
She plucked a snowflake from the box, one with silver sparkles and a hand-drawn smiley face, and taped it above the incubator, just out of reach of the infant but close enough to catch the light. “For him,” Max said. “A little early present.”
The mother managed a soft laugh. “Gracias.”
Max squeezed her shoulder, then moved on. There were other parents, other tiny people to check on. At every stop, she offered an update, a kind word, or, when possible, her best NICUjokes: “Did you know your kid’s O2 sat is higher than mine after I take the stairs to the cafeteria?”
Martha and Juliette kept pace, finishing their assignments with surprising attention to detail. The place transformed under their hands: all monitors draped in tinsel, rails lined with sparkling blue and green, the dull plastic softened by bursts of color and, here and there, a goofy ornament. The lights made the ceiling look lower, cozier, as if the whole unit had curled up for warmth.
Midway through the shift, Max commandeered the microwave and heated up packets of hot chocolate. She poured it into the tiny paper cups the hospital used for mouthwash and passed them around—nurses first, then parents, who sipped gratefully and, for a few minutes, looked less like zombies and more like themselves. The smell of chocolate tangled with the antiseptic tang of disinfectant, an odd but somehow soothing combination.
When the census was quiet and the babies all tucked in, Max allowed herself a moment at the window, looking out at the city blinking in the distance. She thought about the things she could control and the things she couldn’t. The first category was mostly small: decorations, cocoa, a gentle touch. The second was everything else.
Still, it mattered. Even if only for one night.
Martha appeared at her elbow, mug in hand. “You did good, Max.”
Max shrugged but couldn’t help the swell of pride. “It takes a village, a night shift village!”
They stood together in the hush, watching the unit glow with soft, improbable warmth. For a second, Max let herself imagine that even Dr. Patel might crack a smile—or at least not call for a full decontamination sweep. She didn’t know why she wantedher too, and she didn’t linger on the thought much longer to figure out why.
She caught her reflection in the glass: wild hair escaping from her messy bun, cocoa mustache, smiling freely and a little foolish.
There were worse ways to spend Christmas, and there had definitely been worse night shifts; in fact this one was gratefully steady.
She grabbed the stack of baby hats. Knitted donations, every color of the rainbow, and started delivering them down the line, one tiny head at a time. Every hat was different: stripes, polka dots, a lopsided pom-pom. She told each baby the same thing, under her breath, like a secret spell.
“Hang in there, kid.”
And for a little while, the whole place felt lighter, like maybe hope was a germ you could catch if you stood close enough and didn’t wash your hands.
Max was midway through taping a red paper heart to the edge of the dry erase board. When she heard Dr. Patel’s voice drift out from behind curtain three. Not the clipped, businesslike tone of “Rounds Patel,” but something unfamiliar: low, careful, as if she was coaxing a skittish cat out of hiding.
She glanced around. The nurses’ station was momentarily deserted, Juliette off on a stat call and Martha wrangling a pump in pod six. The unit was hushed, except for the shuffle of slippers and the steady beep of pulse-ox.
Max sidled closer, feet silent on the linoleum. A part of the curtain revealed the profile of Asha, perched on the plastic visitor chair, a binder in her lap. Facing her was Mr. Winters—the new dad, thin and unshaven, yesterday’s wristband still clinging to his arm. In the isolette behind him, his daughter Emma slept under her radiant warmer, wires trailing from her impossibly small limbs.
Asha leaned forward, elbows on her knees, hands loose and open. Max caught the tail end of a sentence: “No, you’re not bothering me at all.” Then, after a pause, “I know it’s a lot to take in. That’s why I’m here.”
