When I started blogging about our birth experience I had complete forgotten about this story. Serena reminded me. I guess this was my first official protective fatherly moment. When Serena reminded me, she was like, “You were pissed… don’t you remember? You went to the nurse’s station and demanded to see the head nurse?”
Slowly it all came back to me: The Northside picture guy. I think I destroyed this guy. And I don’t feel bad about it.
First, I need to put this into context. Remember my previous post about Creep-Monkey and the incessant interruptions of our sleeping time-bliss propagated by the Northside Nurses? Well… it’s safe to say we were tired… and a bit punchy. But still. This guy had no excuse for what he did and deserved the throttling he got.
After our first sleepless night and surviving our assigned and extremely rude nighttime nurse, Serena and I requested limited interruptions for our first full day in Northside’s Post Partum wing. That afternoon, after Serena and Gray finally fell asleep… and I got hungry. So I got up, closed the door behind me, and headed down to the Hospital’s McDonald franchisee. When I returned, I found the door to our room wide open and I remember thinking, “Great, another nursing visit.” When I walked in, I found a short little man holding a camera pushing on Serena’s shoulder saying, “miss, miss… you need to wake up.”
After being reminded of this incident, I remember this event exactly how it went down… I can replay the event in my head. I arrived just as this guy was successful in his mission… Serena was just lifting her head and trying to focus her eyes. I broke into the scene, “what’s going on?”
The guy flinched a bit. I surprised him. But he quickly said, “I need to take pictures of the baby.”
Serena and I looked at each other. I said, “It has to be done now? She was sleeping. You just woke her up.”
The guy was very scattered and was trying to direct Serena on how to hold the baby… but she was still out of it. Evidently, he didn’t feel the need to address my question. So I persisted.
“Wait a minute, what is this picture for? Is this something the Hospital needs? They already took a Polaroid of the baby when he was born… I don’t understand.”
The guy finally stopped what he was doing and looked at me, “No, that was for the hospital, I’m a professional photographer, I’m taking pictures of the baby for you… don’t you want to buy pictures of your baby?”
I believe this is the point where my head spun all the way around and I vomited split-pea soup on the guy. “Get the hell out.” “Excuse me?” “Get the hell out of our room. You walk in unannounced and woke my sleeping wife? For what? So you could sell me pictures of my own baby? Get the hell out of our room now. Who let you in here? Did you even knock? What give you the right to…”
This is when I started walking back down the hall towards the nurses’ station. This is also the time the guy disappeared for good. I never saw him again. And he certainly didn’t try to defend his presence to be with the nurses’ station.
Of course, the nurses were just as helpful as they were regarding food options at 11pm. “Who? I don’t know, I don’t think he works for the hospital, he’s probably a contractor or something.” What really got under my skin is the fact the nurses’ station was on our hall about three rooms away. I know they saw the guy and simply didn’t’ want to take responsibility of the situation. My favorite question from the nurses was, “Did you tell him you weren’t interested?”
Me: “Huh, now that would have been a good idea. Thank you. I guess I should have known before going to get food that some strange guy was going to enter my wife room unannounced intending to take picture of my new born child.”
At this point I put a moratorium on unannounced visitors to our room and spoke with the head nurse about my concerns. “If you want to sell me pictures, sell me pictures, schedule an appointment. But entering a room unannounced and waking up a sleeping mother is unacceptable. Keeping people out of our room isn’t my job, it’s your job.”
I know… harsh. But I didn’t pay for the room upgrade to have an open-door policy.
I can only assume random photographers slip into rooms trying to sell photographs at Northside all the time. It seems very strange. And a security risk.
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