the one where I met Taylor Swift

This month, I’m going to see Taylor Swift perform in Las Vegas (insert all the squealing memes here). This will be the first time I see her perform live, but it isn’t the first time I’ll be in a room with her (and it probably won’t be the second time I get to have a short conversation with her, unfortunately!).

There’s a good chance I’ve already told you this story, especially if we’ve ever played an icebreaker game like Two Truths and a Lie together. However, just because I’m counting down to the show in every way (not only am I excited for the show itself, but the brief respite it’ll give me from the daily demands of motherhood, especially at the tail end of spring break), I’m sharing the whole story. You’re welcome.

***

I’d graduated from my pediatric nursing residency at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles a few months before. Because of the hospital’s location, celebrities often came to visit the kids, usually in the hospital playrooms. However, I worked on a bone marrow transplant unit, and nearly all the patients were under strict isolation protocols. They couldn’t go to the playrooms, and the only celebrity encounter I’d had to that point was the table of snacks Kris Jenner had sent over from the oncology playroom, with the injunction, “I hope you don’t believe all the things they say about me!”

That morning, one of the new nurse residents grabbed my arm. “I heard someone’s coming,” he said.

“Someone I’d know?” I asked him. I’d already lamented the fact that I probably passed minor celebrities all the time, but I didn’t know who they were.

“Well…” he said. “I heard it’s Taylor Swift.” My jaw must have dropped, because he hastily added, “Don’t tell anyone until after. You know, paparazzi.”

Oh, right. Because paparazzi was a thing I’d worried about before.

I forgot about our upcoming visitor in the rush of assessments, morning meds, and charting, but a little after ten, my nurse resident friend came by my station at the back of the unit again. “She’s here,” he said. We rushed up to the front with another resident and huddled together, peeking outside the unit. Taylor Swift and her entourage were just beyond the double doors. She putting the hideous, required blue shoe covers over her designer heels.

My patient was the last on the unit, and I didn’t want to make myself annoying, so after an initial giddy glance, I tucked myself back into my station. The normally hushed unit was buzzing as Taylor went into room after room. I went in to check on my patient, a teenage girl. “Do you want to meet her?” I asked.

“Yeah,” my patient answered. “But will you stay in the room with me? My mom isn’t here and I’m nervous.” I mean, sure, twist my arm. My patient went into her bathroom to put makeup on, and I checked my med list again, just to occupy my mind.

Eventually, Taylor Swift went into the room before my patient’s. I sanitized my hands and gowned up, tying a surgical mask over my face per my patient’s isolation protocols. Each of our patient rooms had an antechamber. The rooms all had negative pressure, meaning the air was forcefully blown out to keep any sort of infection-causing microorganism away from our immunocompromised patients.

Outside the large glass window, I heard the charge nurse telling Taylor Swift that to come into my patient’s room, she would need to put on a yellow paper isolation gown and a mask. “Sure, that’s cool,” she said. She came into the antechamber and multiple members of her entourage followed her, fussing over her and helping her tie her gown. They were stacked in the tiny space like sardines. Only Taylor herself was permitted in the actual room, but the entourage ringleader, who seemed to be her manager, hovered at the window.

My patient sat on the bed, hood over her bald head. Taylor Swift walked in. She was wearing a short black-and-white striped A-line dress with cap sleeves and high heels. She seemed impossibly tall. She popped down on the foot of my patient’s bed. “Hi!” she said brightly. “I love this hood thing you’ve got going on. Very cool.”

It struck me that maybe Taylor was also kind of nervous. What do you say to a kid with a terminal illness? My patient almost seemed to have the upper hand.

“So, how long have you been here?” Taylor continued.

“Um… I don’t remember exactly. Lorren?” she looked over at me. My heart jumped. I was about to speak to the queen.

“Well, you’re day +54 post transplant, and you had 7 days of chemo, and transplant day was day 0, so… 62 days?” I accidentally made the IV pump I was fiddling with beep.

Taylor Swift turned her eyes one me and said, “Wow, you’re really good at math.”

“Yeah, you are,” my patient said. I choked out a thank you and tried not to giggle like a fool. “But anyway, I get to go home pretty soon.”

“YOU DO!?” Taylor absolutely beamed at this news. “I’m so glad you get to go home!”

At this moment, one of our housekeepers came in to take out the trash. I knew Rosa well—we worked the same days—and there is no doubt in my mind that she did not need to take out the trash at that particular moment, but I absolutely do not fault her for pushing through the anxious managers in the antechamber to get into that room.

“Can you take a picture?” my patient asked. “My phone is dead.”

I was absolutely not supposed to text my patients EVER—I could have been fired for it—but I wasn’t going to deny my patient a picture with Taylor Swift. “Of course,” I said. Taylor pulled her mask down and put her arm around my patient, smiling with that classic red lip that has become her trademark. (After Taylor left the room, I texted my patient and told her she had to delete my number right away, not because I wouldn’t have loved to hear from her, but because I could have gotten fired if anyone found out. I am a rule follower, my friends.)

“Well, it was so nice to talk to you. Congratulations on getting to go home soon,” Taylor said, squeezing my patient’s shoulders and standing up. "

“Thank you so much for coming,” I said.

“Of course!” she beamed, and turned toward the door.

At that point Rosa—who was a very short person—leaned her head back to look up at Taylor and said, “Wow, you are beautiful.”

“Well, thank you. I think YOU are beautiful,” Taylor responded. Rosa looked at me like, Did that really just happen?

A few weeks later, Taylor sent big merch packages from her Red tour to all the patients.

***

I was a Taylor Swift fan before I met her. My sister shared Taylor’s first album with me the summer after my freshman year of college, and I was instantly hooked. I’m about eighteen months older than Taylor, and so many of her emotions about dating and wanting to be seen and heard resonated directly with me. (Did I scream “Picture to Burn” over a bonfire of relationship artifacts after a boy broke my heart that summer? Um, maybe.) My husband played “Love Story” in the car on his way to propose to me. My sister and I giggled over the wedding disturbance in “Speak Now”—a dramatic scene we’d played out with Barbies. I gaped in awe at the cleverness of “Dear John” and the guitar riffs that sounded just like John Mayer (who, incidentally, was the first concert I ever attended).

But I hadn’t paid much attention to Taylor Swift in the couple of years before I met her. I was a 25-year-old mother to a toddler, working full time with a husband in grad school. I hadn’t listened to Red (or really any new-to-me music since college).

However, my experience meeting her solidified my status as a forever fan. I already liked her music, but the way she treated the kids at the hospital that day cemented my respect for her. She isn’t the only celebrity I met in my time at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, but she is the one who gave the most time, energy, and kindness to the kids.

I’ll leave you with the picture I took that day (with my patient’s face covered, of course!).

Meanwhile, tell me in the comments—have you ever met a famous person? Did it make you like them more or less?