Gen Z labor nurse honors every baby she's helped deliver—one bead at a time
Imagine is every hospital had a "baby bead jar."
A nurse holding a baby (left); Jars of beads (right)
Gen Zers are often made fun of for baring their hearts online and not having the same emotional compartmentalization skills as their predecessors, but as these folks enter the workplace, especially in the healthcare field, those qualities might be just what’s desperately needed.
Case and point: Jayuanna Thomas, a 25-year-old labor nurse who commemorates every birth she’s ever participated in with especially colored beads. So far, she has 211 beads in her baby bead jar.
She currently has 117 beads blue for boys, and 90 pink for girls. The there are eight yellow for the sweet babies who were “born sleeping” and are “just as important as blues and pinks." Next she has one purple, for the one time (so far) that she delivered a baby entirely alone, simply because things happened too fast. Finally, she has two green, for the “special” deliveries that touched Nurse Jay’s heart in a unique way that she’d never forget.
@jayuanna.lenee Here’s my baby jar! So thankful to be apart of so many special deliveries🥹🩵🩷💛💚 #babyjay #babybeadjar #laboranddelivery #laboranddeliverynurse #landdnurse ♬ Walking Around - Instrumental Version - Eldar Kedem
It's such a simple idea, and yet it really hit a powerful nerve among viewers, especially those with their own “yellow bead babies.”
“My daughter is someone’s yellow bead but she is forever my first pink bead.”
“As the mom of a baby born sleeping, 41 years ago, 3 weeks overdue, it was the nurse I remember all of these years. She was a bright light in a dark time.”
“My son was stillborn in 2018. The compassionate nurses really got me through it. Thank you for honoring the other stillborns. It means a lot.”
I wonder if my Angel baby is a bead in someone's jar.”
In an interview withNewsweek, Thomas shared that being an obstetrician-gynecologist (OBGYN) and delivering babies has been her dream since she was five years old.
"I never wanted to be anything else," she said. "One of my favorite parts of my job outside of being able to see life being brought into the world is sitting in my patients' rooms for HOURS getting to know them, their likes, dislikes, music preferences, what books they're reading etc."
Thomas’ deep emotional connection to her work is made all the more evident by her baby bead jar, which is not only heartwarming, but pretty revolutionary when you think about it. Our current healthcare system, among its many flaws, often focuses more on clinical care than compassionate care. Imagine if every hospital room had a similar baby bead jar, commemorating every birth for the sacred event that it is, regardless of the outcome?
A pair of hands holding another pair of hands. Photo credit: Canva
Luckily, Thomas, and many nurses just like her, find their own unique ways of going against the system to humanly care in truly wonderful ways. Seems like Gen Z has a thing or two to teach us after all.