The NICU Nurse Who Learned to Listen

When Maria Gonzalez started her first rotation in the neonatal intensive care unit at Johns Hopkins, every baby's cry sounded the same to her — a thin, urgent wail that set her pulse racing. She rushed from incubator to incubator, checking monitors, adjusting tubes, always a step behind.

Then veteran nurse Doreen Hatcher pulled her aside. "Slow down," she said. "Close your eyes and just listen." Over the following weeks, Doreen taught Maria to hear what she had been missing — the sharp, staccato cry that meant pain, the rhythmic fussing that meant hunger, the low whimper that simply meant "I need to be held." What had been indistinguishable noise became a language.

"I didn't learn a new skill," Maria later told nursing students. "I learned to stop reacting and start receiving."

When young Samuel heard a voice calling his name in the darkened temple, he did not recognize it. Three times he ran to Eli, certain the old priest had summoned him. It took Eli — his Doreen Hatcher — to help him understand what he was hearing. "Go lie down," Eli said, "and if He calls you, say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.'"