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.

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Koren Thomas

Associate Editor at DailyNurse

Koren Thomas (pictured with Assistant) was the associate editor of DailyNurse from late 2019 through July, 2022—and she was not joking about the "issue postage stamps saluting US nurses" idea. Send your article ideas, submissions, Nurse of the Week suggestions, comments, and corrections to the current Editor in Chief at [email protected].