Caring for Critical Hearts: Meet Sarah Cazenave, Cardiac ICU Nurse

Caring for Critical Hearts: Meet Sarah Cazenave, Cardiac ICU Nurse

Sarah Cazenave is a BSN, RN, and CCRN who works in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Children’s Hospital New Orleans (CHNOLA). She takes care of the most critical cardiac patients at the hospital. Her cousin, Brooks, was born with only half of a functioning heart and had to undergo a staged surgical plan of 3 surgeries at CHNOLA. The care he received inspired Cazenave to become a Cardiac ICU nurse at the same hospital.

Daily Nurse proudly honors Sarah Cazenave as the Nurse of the Week.

Cazenave says Brooks and the care he received inspired her to become a Cardiac ICU nurse at the same hospital that cared for her cousin. “I am so fortunate to work with many amazing individuals who cared for Brooks while he was in the hospital. It is a challenging but rewarding specialty.”

Cazenave shares what it was like visiting Brooks while he was receiving care.

“Upon entering the unit, a staff member immediately barks at me to wash my hands and then escorts me to his hospital room. My aunt, a nurse herself, is sitting at the bedside. We quietly talk about my cousin’s progress as he rests comfortably in the bed,” she says.

She recalls glancing at all the pumps, lines, and chest tubes while maintaining her distance a few feet away. She doesn’t want to wake Brooks up and recalls the complexity of the scene, making her feel nervous.

“I am scared to touch anything for fear of messing it up. After twenty minutes, I hugged my aunt goodbye and hastily left the unit. I feel relieved when I leave the hospital. Children are supposed to be running around and playing with toys at this age, not hooked up to numerous monitors and lines in a hospital bed. The whole experience feels foreign to me,” she adds.

Cazenave’s cousin Brooks, now eight years old, was born with Uhl’s Anomaly, tricuspid atresia, and pulmonary atresia. He received four open heart surgeries at Children’s Hospital before the age of four, with his latest being the Fontan in 2018. He is now a happy and healthy eight-year-old who enjoys playing with Pokemon, jumping on the trampoline, and having pillow fights.

Fast forward five years later. Cazenave now works with the most critical cardiac patients at Children’s Hospital in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

Cazenave cherishes the privilege of watching Brooks grow up and is grateful for the care he received at Children’s Hospital. Brooks inspired her to become a Cardiac ICU nurse, and she is proud to work with the same amazing individuals who cared for him while he was in the hospital.

She says it’s a challenging but rewarding specialty.

“Now, when I enter the unit, it doesn’t feel foreign to me, but rather like home.”

Nominate a Nurse of the Week! Every Wednesday, DailyNurse.com features a nurse making a difference in the lives of their patients, students, and colleagues. We encourage you to nominate a nurse who has impacted your life as the next Nurse of the Week, and we’ll feature them online and in our weekly newsletter. 

Celebrating a Baby’s First Halloween in the NICU

Celebrating a Baby’s First Halloween in the NICU

It’s Halloween at the Children’s Hospital New Orleans (CHNOLA), and the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) nursing team is celebrating with adorable handmade animal costumes for their babies. The NICU nursing team will dress as zookeepers to match the babies.

Emily Cade, RN in the CHNOLA NICU, says making costumes and dressing the babies up for Halloween is a special tradition in the Children’s Hospital NICU.

“We love seeing our babies celebrate their first Halloween, and we love the joy the parents get from having a little bit of real-life normalcy while their babies are in the hospital.”

Haley Ingold, mom of baby Rhett, says being in the hospital with her baby can be sad and scary. “It’s really fun that the nurses do this for the babies. It makes being in the hospital fun and a little less difficult.”

The NICU nurses all chip in to make the costumes and treat all the babies as their own. Their kindness and compassion embody CHNOLA values, and they go above and beyond to give families the best experience.

The CHNOLA NICU nursing teams include Jacqueline Schnapp, Courtney Finnegan, Remy Rodrigues, Camryn Faucheaux, Robyn Ledet, Katherine Treuting, Madeline Haydel, Hailey Diechmann, Sarah Finken, Brooke Tompkins, Ashley Gullo, Madeline Eckert, and Emily Cade.

Have a safe and Happy Halloween!

Two Childhood Cancer Survivors Share Unbreakable Bond at Children’s Hospital New Orleans

Two Childhood Cancer Survivors Share Unbreakable Bond at Children’s Hospital New Orleans

Two women battled cancer as kids; one inspired the other to follow in her footsteps to become a nurse. Both are colleagues at Children’s Hospital New Orleans (CHNOLA).

Laura Shinn, RN – Hematology/Oncology/HSCT Nurse Navigator at CHNOLA, says she went into nursing and specifically oncology because she just felt that there was this need to take the medical path. She was diagnosed with embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma in May 1987 and finished treatment shortly before her ninth birthday.

Jenna Cavalero is a nurse technician in her second year at Delgado Charity School of Nursing. She was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in October 2011 and was 12 years old when she went through nine months of chemo and several surgeries and was Shinn’s patient. She knew she wanted to be a nurse since the end of her cancer treatment.

“I feel like I connect more with these kids because of what I went through as a cancer patient. I remember being in their shoes, how I liked to be treated in certain instances, and seeing a little glimmer of light up inside them. It reassures them that they can beat cancer, they can conquer the disease, and hopefully come out on the other side,” says Cavalero

Our interview with Laura Shinn and Jenna Cavalero follows, edited for length and clarity.

Where did you go to nursing school, and why did you become a nurse?

Shinn: Mississippi College School of Nursing. I graduated from nursing school in May of 2005. For the third time, I decided to change my major to nursing because I felt this need to give back and help others in the same position I was in as a child. To show them the caring, compassion, and dedication provided to me as a cancer patient.

Cavalero: I am in my second year at Delgado Charity School of Nursing and will graduate in May 2024. I officially decided to be a nurse when I attended orientation at the first university I attended. Environmental science was my major, and I immediately switched to nursing. However, I knew from the moment I seriously considered career paths in high school. Nothing interested me more, even when I was not fully committed to being a nurse.

When I was going through cancer treatment, so many of the nurses who took care of me became family to me, and I want to be that for the patients I treat in the future. I bonded with many of the nurses and am still in contact with them because of their huge impact on my heart. I have always loved helping people and working with kids, so when I finally sat down and put all the pieces together, the decision to go to nursing school was a no-brainer.

What are your career goals when you graduate? 

Cavalero: After graduation, I would love to start my career at CHNOLA, and from there, I would like to see where life takes me. I would love to be a travel nurse one day, but right now, my focus is on graduation, and I will figure out the rest as I go.

What does working in the same hospital as the nurse who cared for you as a child mean to you? 

Cavalero: The feeling is surreal. The hospital has had a complete makeover since I was treated, so it looks very different, but so much of it feels the same to me. When I first started working at CHNOLA, I had a lot of memories rushing back to me from when I was treated, both happy and sad. I am grateful for the opportunity to have this job that I love, and I cannot wait to be a registered nurse. I used to joke around with some of the nurses I grew close to, saying things like, “You’ll see me here in ten years sitting behind the nurse’s station,” that dream becoming a reality is so exciting.

How does it make you feel knowing you inspired Jenna’s career path?

Shinn: Knowing I had any influence on Jenna’s career path is very humbling. You go into nursing to provide these young patients with the best care possible, but you rarely think of your care impacting and inspiring their future. It motivates me to be the best nurse and example I can be so she can strive for and surpass my illustration.

How did Laura inspire you to follow in her footsteps?

Cavalero: Laura has always been a great representation of how I would like to be as a nurse. She is kind, thoughtful, goofy, and joyful, and many other qualities make her great. Laura is always full of smiles whenever she walks into a room and works hard. Watching the way she takes care of patients and works with other members of staff is something I admire about her.

How is/did your nursing education prepare you for your role as a Hematology/Oncology/HSCT Nurse Navigator?  

Shinn: My nursing education prepared me for the basic, essential tasks of nursing, such as taking vital signs, but the on-the-job experience teaches you how to apply those basic textbook skills to your patient and hour-to-hour activities. In school, you learn how to take blood pressure and what a normal range is, but the on-the-job experience trains you to know when that pressure is life-threatening and requires immediate attention. What you learn in school is very important because it is the base to grow the knowledge that will be imparted to you during your career. But textbooks and clinicals won’t teach you to care and have compassion for your patient. To know what and how to cheer them up or improve their experience and when to sit and be present and supportive.

How is/did your nursing education prepare you for your role as a nurse technician?

Cavalero: My education has prepared me by knowing background information for the different disease processes the patients on my unit have and why they are being treated the way they are.  

How has having cancer as a young child and the kindness you both share for each other helped you forge an unbreakable bond with each other?

Shinn: To see someone you have helped reach a pivotal point in their life, whether it be simply remission or seeing them become a nurse, knowing they went through a similar journey, rewards you in the most significant way possible in this career. It’s a bond that cannot be broken or understood by anyone else. The smile says, “I know, and I know you know,” and fills your heart with warmth and joy. This is the bond Jenna and I will always have.

Cavalero: Deciding to disclose my medical history with a family is something I have yet to do often. I can imagine Laura was the same way when talking about her history. It’s a powerful thing that she shared with me and showed me that my thoughts of wanting to be a nurse when I got older could be a reality. Knowing that our situations were not the same but a little similar made Laura easier to talk to when I was having tough days because I knew that, on some level, she understood.

How does this bond translate to your patients?

Shinn: For me, our bond serves as a reminder to ensure every patient receives the best care possible. Not only physical care but providing the emotional care and support the patient and family need during their journey. One day, no matter what career path they choose, at least one positive thing you provided will remain with them and pass that same care on to the next person.

What is it like giving back to the profession that helped you as children?

Shinn: It is incredibly gratifying to provide care for the current patients in the same institution, with some of the same physicians who cared for me. It has been a dream of mine since I was young to be able to return to Children’s as a member of its staff, and now I can check that one off of my list.

Cavalero: Helping children is all I have ever wanted to do, and getting closer to graduation and being able to do that for my career is very exciting. I love my job as a nurse technician. I love going to work, learning from the nurses, and seeing all the patients. I am excited to be what all of the nurses who treated me were for me to someone else.

How do your personal experiences help you care for your patients?

Shinn: I try to remember how I was treated, how I would have liked to have been treated, and what I would have liked to have known as a patient, and apply it to my daily practice in a manner that is age and learning appropriate for the patient.

Cavalero: My personal experiences help me understand how they feel on good and bad days. A cancer diagnosis is scary for everyone involved, so being able to help in any way that I can is all I have ever wanted to do.

What is the most rewarding aspect of your job?

Shinn: It is one of the most rewarding experiences. All jobs have their good days and bad days, but in the end, seeing a child ring the bell at the end of their therapy or walk out of the clinic’s front door for the last time makes it the best job in the world.

Cavalero: Seeing my patients smile and having a good day while in the hospital is always a good feeling, but the most rewarding is watching them leave the unit when they are discharged to go home because they are always so happy. That makes my heart happy.

Nurse of the Week Felica Croft Articulates the Pain of this Delta Summer

Nurse of the Week Felica Croft Articulates the Pain of this Delta Summer

Our Nurse of the Week, Felicia Croft, RN is a 34-year-old ICU nurse in Covid-beleaguered Shreveport, LA. The latest surge has hit her close to home in every sense of the phrase. She is treating neighbors and friends in the Covid-19 ICU unit at Willis-Knighton Health System , and just about every member of her immediate family has been infected at some point. Earlier this month, Croft’s husband was still very sick and she was coping with the pandemic on both home and work fronts. Feeling overwhelmed while driving home after a particularly grim shift, she pulled over to try to get her head together. She parked in a Dairy Queen parking lot, picked up her phone, and for about three minutes—blinking to hold back tears, and occasionally pausing to take a deep breath—Croft opened her heart in a video that may leave you blinking, too.

Shreveport RN Felicia Croft

“So many of the people that we’re getting haven’t been vaccinated, and—just to know that there’s something that could help [save them], and they aren’t taking advantage of it . . . .

I can’t explain the feeling of defeat—when you do everything, you pour everything into a patient . . . and it’s not enough.”

The Delta variant is proving to be faster, stronger, and far more transmissible than its forebears. Even as earlier surges reaped over half a million American lives, fear and denial prompted many to tell themselves, “Oh, this is mainly a danger to the elderly and people in poor health.” Even some ICU nurses believed this, as they saw the old and those with comorbidities pass away, while survivors moved to other units to begin the slow, painful recovery process. Now, as most seniors have gotten both jabs, Delta is making a meal of the unvaccinated. SARS-CoV-2 is filling hospitals with younger, healthier bodies—and even pediatric wards are treating tiny Covid patients. So this time, nurses are wrestling with frustration and anger on top of the stress, grief, and fear they’ve been accumulating since last year.

Felicia Croft had to tell someone what it is like. Fighting back tears, she addressed her camera:

“I’ve worked in the Covid ICU for pretty much the whole pandemic… And today was probably one of the most emotionally hard days since the pandemic started. The Delta wave that we’re seeing now, people are younger and sicker, and we are intubating—and losing people my age and younger. People with kids that are my kids’ age that are never going to see their kids graduate. They’re never going to meet their grand-kids…”

Her 14-year-old daughter, Croft added, had come to her the day before and said,

“We need to pray for [her friend’s] parents… And her friend’s parents are both in my ICU! And one of them may not go home. And as a nurse, to know that if you can’t get these two people home, that their kids… will be orphaned… and my daughter will ask, ‘why didn’t you save them?’ So many of the people that we’re getting haven’t been vaccinated, and—just to know that there’s something that could help [save them], and they aren’t taking advantage of it…. Yes, we have seen people who were vaccinated, but they usually go home…. I can’t explain the feeling of defeat—when you do everything, you pour everything into a patient—and it’s not enough!”

Caring for a patient who is your own age—losing a patient who is your own age to Covid-19—is a bitter pill for young nurses to swallow. In a world where wearing a protective mask in the middle of a pandemic can arouse heated debate (and, if temperatures rise, fistfights or shootings—see list at end of story), the road to many a hospital bed right now is paved with false claims and rumors. You cannot blame the patient for having been lulled into a false sense of security, or for being misled, but it’s deeply traumatic to encounter so much suffering and loss of life (or quality of life, depending on the outcome) that could have easily been prevented. Croft’s confessional touched a nerve; over a million people viewed it. If you have not seen it yet, the full three-minute recording is below.

Nurse Felicia Croft’s post-shift video.

For more on Felicia Croft, visit KARK.com.

An Ongoing Epidemic? Recent Shootings and Assaults Over Masking Disputes

In the interests of fairness, it should be noted that in 2020, the unmasked were likelier to be plaintiffs in violent disputes, but the reported incidents were less violent. In spring 2021, though, people started responding with fists, guns, saliva, etc. when asked to don a mask.

Nurse of the Week Carla Brown is on a Mission to Vaccinate North Baton Rouge

Nurse of the Week Carla Brown is on a Mission to Vaccinate North Baton Rouge

Nurse of the Week, Carla Brown, RN, accompanied by a colleague clutching a clipboard to her chest, is standing outside a house in her North Baton Rouge, LA neighborhood. “You seem kind of impatient when you get to these doors to talk to these people…” a CBS reporter remarks . “Yes,” Brown replies, “Because I feel the urgency… Today I could see you, and tomorrow, you may not be here.”

Carla Brown does not have time for nonsense. These days, in addition to her work as an RN in a hospice, Brown has also donned the mantle of a community nurse. After experiencing her own tragic Covid loss, she’s managing her grief by doubling down on what nurses do best: helping people. Now, when not on duty at the hospice, Carla is on duty in her majority-Black North Baton Rouge area, pounding the pavement (nurses are also expert walkers!) and signing up neighbors for Covid-19 vaccination appointments. And when her elderly or disabled “patients” cannot reach a vaccination site, Brown swings by in her car and drives them there.

Her own loss was the nightmare of every frontline nurse. After Brown unknowingly contracted an asymptomatic case of Sars-CoV-2 at work, she came home and infected her family with the virus. The consequences were devastating. Carla’s husband, “the love of my life, David,” fell ill, as did her 90-year-old father, and 67-year-old brother. All three—husband, father, and brother—had to be hospitalized. Her spouse, David Brown, died in the hospital at age 67.

The grim statistics in the Baton Rouge vaccination efforts against Covid-19—that 64% of the white population has had at least one shot, while just 26% of the city’s Black community have had jabs—gave the bereaved Carla a new purpose: “All I can do now,” she says, “Is save somebody else.”

The vast discrepancy between white Baton Rouge and Black Baton Rouge has less to do with vaccine hesitancy than it does with our old familiar frenemy, structural racism. North Baton Rouge (NBR) has long been underserved by the local healthcare system, and the Covid vaccines have been strangely scarce in the area. Aside from a few ephemeral pop-up vaccination sites that have been hosted by Black churches, vaccines have been available at only four sites in the district.

To attack the vaccine scarcity problem, Carla employed some special artillery. Clad in her hospice uniform, the undaunted RN stepped into a popular neighborhood pharmacy—with a CBS reporter and camera crew in tow—and asked to speak with the owner. She told the proprietor that she could provide the completed registrations, insurance paperwork, and ID confirmations for NBR locals who have been won over by her urgent campaign. “We just need,” she said, “Somebody to supply us with the vaccine.”

The result? Well, it is hard to dismiss nurse Brown even when she is not accompanied by a news team from a major national broadcasting network. In fact, after agreeing to order vaccine ASAP, the pharmacist implied he had little choice: “She’s an angel!” he said of Carla. “An angel in disguise.”

A tough angel, though. As Brown told a local station in Baton Rouge, “You want to go to your grave early, or you want to live? That’s been my sales pitch.” And when walking the streets and knocking on doors doesn’t get results, “Some [neighbors] I just physically took in my car and brought.”

See the full CBS video report on Carla Brown’s story and the health inequities in North Baton Rouge. She is also featured in a recent New York Times article.

Nurse of the Week: Carolyn Storck Worked Frontlines on a Crutch

Nurse of the Week: Carolyn Storck Worked Frontlines on a Crutch

Even while she was recuperating from leg surgery, Nurse of the Week Carolyn Storck couldn’t stay home during a pandemic. Storck, a former military Major in the Navy Nurse Corps and the wife of an active duty Marine, isn’t accustomed to being consigned to the sidelines, but her leg operation for Achilles tendonitis and a Haglund’s deformity was supposed to keep her out of action for at least four weeks.

However, the New Orleans NP found it impossible to keep off her feet when the Big Easy was struck by COVID-19. Accustomed to working as an Emergency Nurse at the city’s VA Medical Center and Ochsner Medical Center, Storck felt the tug of duty when “We hit that really bad two or three weeks in New Orleans, where we were having a lot of patients with COVID, a lot of hospitalizations, a lot of people on ventilators… Everything blew up.” Instead of spending the month off her feet, she returned to work just 12 days after her surgery.

Her return was made possible by a recent technological breakthrough, a special hands-free crutch known as an iWalk. With her lower leg supported by the iWalk, Storck navigated her way through the hospital during her 12-hour shifts. Of the high-tech crutch, which effectively took the place of her lower leg, Storck marveled, “Even a scooter would not have given me the level of mobility like this.”

Her use of their product prompted the president of iWalk to issue a statement describing Storck as a “hero,” but the praise left her somewhat abashed. “I think we’re all just doing our jobs,” she commented. “This is what we went into medicine to do. It’s nice to be acknowledged, but it’s also, you do what you got to do.”

Now able to walk unaided, Storck is wistfully looking forward to running as well: “My hope is that one day I can run again. I still see myself as a runner, even though I haven’t done it in three years. My specialist is going to eventually do the other [leg], and my hope is that it’s actually cured enough that I can get back to running again.”

For more on Carolyn Storck’s story, see the article in People Magazine.