From Grateful Patient to Proud Employee: Olivia’s Story

When Olivia graduated from Merrimack College and joined the Shriners Children’s Boston staff team as an inpatient nurse, she achieved a goal 10 years in the making.

Her burn treatment at the hospital as a young teen, and the nurses who cared for her, helped set the course for Olivia’s future. A decade later, she is now being mentored by some of those same nurses as she provides care to children impacted by burn injuries.

On a summer night when she was 13, Olivia went out on the back deck of her family’s home to ask her older brother a question. Home from college, he was outside with friends and began adding citronella oil to a tabletop firepot as Olivia approached. Suddenly it burst into flames, immediately burning her hands, chest and face. Thinking quickly, Olivia’s brother pushed her onto the outdoor couch and smothered the flames with a pillow. Olivia remembers being in shock and telling her parents she was okay when they rushed outside. They immediately drove her to their local hospital.

“My parents were really panicked, so I was trying not to be,” Olivia recalled. “I remember looking in the car mirror and I saw the burn on my face, then I looked down at my hands and saw the skin was starting to bubble. I was scared.” After it was determined that Olivia needed care at Shriners Children’s Boston, she was transported there by ambulance. Her wounds required debridement, removal of the damaged skin, and frequent dressing changes over the course of her week-long inpatient stay.

Olivia recalls how attentive the child life staff were to the kinds of music and movies she liked, playing her favorite band, One Direction, during the uncomfortable debridement procedure to make it more bearable. Although she was older than the other patients on the inpatient unit, Olivia befriended two younger boys who were also being treated for burn injuries. “Looking back, this is when I started to realize I wanted to work with children,” she said.

A memory that also stands out for Olivia is the care she received from Kara Sher, inpatient nurse manager at Shriners Children’s Boston, and now her supervisor. “Kara would make it fun,” Olivia remembered. “I would be having a bad day, and she would do something funny. She was very comforting in her own special way.”

After being discharged, Olivia had difficulty coping with her injuries. As a young teen, she was very self-conscious of how her appearance had changed. “Those middle school years are so formative, and I really struggled,” she recalled. “It happened over the summer, so when I returned to school, I looked different, and I felt different.”

When she got older and her injuries healed, Olivia’s follow-up visits to the hospital became less frequent. She decided she wanted to do something to give back to Shriners Children’s Boston. She organized fundraisers and volunteered to come to the hospital to do activities with patients. “The accident that caused my burn injury was such a monumental event in my life, and I finally realized that something good could come from it,” Olivia said. “It brought out something in me that gave me a purpose. I think that’s when I really knew I wanted to become a nurse.”

In college as a nursing major, Olivia hoped to complete a clinical rotation at Shriners Children’s Boston but couldn’t work it into her schedule. Although she enjoyed her other clinical experiences, Olivia ultimately decided her goal was to work in burn care. “I just felt pulled to Shriners,” she explained. “It was something I wanted to explore from the beginning.”

In a true full-circle experience, Olivia is being mentored by Kara and other veteran members of the inpatient nursing staff as she begins her career at Shriners Children’s Boston. Grateful for her care as a teen, Olivia has an even deeper appreciation for the hospital a decade later, as an employee. “This is a special place; it’s like a family,” she said. "It’s so different from other hospitals. It means something to work here. The people I’m learning from really care, and that’s what makes a good nurse."