Nancy is trained as a nurse. Actually, Nancy is a nurse-midwife and clinical director of a birth center, but I want to focus on the nurse bit. I never thought much about nursing growing up, and then as a young feminist I lumped it into the “professions women got shoved into because all the others were closed to them.” Recite with me folks: nurse, teacher, social worker, librarian. Sure, plenty of women who wanted to be doctors got shunted into nursing. And some of nursing is following orders.

But you’d think someone who spent a year researching and writing about the founder of modern nursing—my senior thesis was called “The Lady with the Lamp Illuminated: A Feminist Analysis of Florence Nightengale’s Religious Thought”—would have a little more respect. Nancy helped me understand that a nurse acts the way I want all my medical support to act. They spend time with you; they listen to you; they treat you as a human with a problem, not just a problem. They see you at your most vulnerable and help.

I love this insider’s view into medicine, and frankly, I love having a medical expert in my life.