Job: Nurse, neonatal intensive care unit, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston
What I do: When the tiniest patients need attention in the neonatal ICU at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta's Egleston unit, Nancy Brooks is there.
And she commutes from Florida.
Brooks, 49, has been a staff nurse at the hospital for 25 years. After raising two daughters and a foster daughter who had been a patient at the hospital, Brooks relocated to the Florida Panhandle, a six-hour drive from her job. "I love the beach," she said.
Her schedule of six 12-hour days, followed by six days off, allows her to enjoy the beach and her job. She stays in a condo in Atlanta during her six-day workweek.
At the hospital, she works "with very high-risk children -- newborns -- who are born with severe congenital abnormalities." Many are on respirators or lung-bypass machines or have had surgery right after birth.
"We see the rarest of anomalies," Brooks said. "I can't imagine another job to go to, to have the opportunity to positively affect someone's life."
What got me interested in this: "I always wanted to be a nurse -- and in a neonatal intensive care unit [since] before there were NICUs," she said. As a child, she had a Nurse Nancy kit and would give family members candy pills and take their temperatures.
"Nursing is the greatest profession anyone can enter," she said.
Best part of my job: "Working with the best of the best medical professionals in the world," she said of her colleagues at Children's. And working with and being an advocate for patients' families. "Their family becomes our family," she said.
She has attended christenings and graduations of former patients and has received cards and flowers from grateful parents.
She recalled a time when one mother, whose baby didn't survive, saw her in a grocery store. The woman remembered Brooks' hands and how they caressed her baby in the last moments of the infant's life.
Most challenging part: "When we have to admit there is no more that medical intervention can do -- when we lose those babies," she said. "We know we've done everything we can for the child. We take it very personally."
What people don't know about my job: "Nurses are a very caring group. It's definitely a calling to be a nurse," she said.
In the NICU, "we're very protective of our little patients." The work of the NICU also draws praise. Brooks recalled a grandfather telling her, "I never knew what miracles go on in here every day."
What keeps me going: "The challenge of the job -- it's never the same," she said. "There's a new patient every day."
Preparation needed for this job: Nurses must love children to be pediatric nurses.
For work in NICU, nurses get training through experience as well as continuing education through the hospital.
- By Karl Ritzler, for ajcjobs. Got an interesting job that you love? E-mail your story to jobseditor@ajc.com.