When she was in high school, Sheny Hill delivered meal s to patients at WellStar Cobb Hospital and watched nurses in action.

“I saw that they were loved and respected for what they could do, and I wanted to be one,” said Hill, 41.

After years of working as a medical assistant at a pediatric medical practice, Hill enrolled in nursing school at Kennesaw State University and graduated in 2003. She has come full circle and now works on a medical/surgical floor at WellStar Cobb.

“I love the fact that I began on the 1st floor here and am now working on the 5th floor serving the same community,” Hill said. “When you become a nurse you’re supposed to give medicine, but nursing is so much more than that. You’re supposed to fix things and make them better.”

Working with oncology patients has taught Hill that nurses must wear many hats.

“Some days you’re a handholder, some days you’re a cheerleader. Other days you cry with a patient,” she said.

Some days, nurses do a lot more, as Hill did for a young patient who was diagnosed with stomach and gall bladder cancer.

“He had come to the U.S. to work with his brothers and had a wife and young daughter. He was only 27 and spoke broken English, so I spoke to him in Spanish and sometimes translated for him with the staff,” Hill said.

After she discovered that they both were from  Guatemala, they  bonded easily by sharing childhood memories .

From the beginning, the patient’s diagnosis was dire,  and Hill was present when doctors told him and his family that hospice was his only choice  and he had only two weeks to live.

“He looked at his brother and said, 'I want to go home.’ I knew that he didn’t mean Marietta,” Hill recalled.

The man wanted to return to Guatemala and  see his mother for the first time  in seven years.

“His brothers couldn’t take him because he needed so much medical care, so I told them I could do it. I would take him home,” Hill said.

“The family was shocked and forever grateful that a nurse would go above and beyond in order to help them in this way,” said Kippie Lipham, a translator at WellStar Cobb.

“I have a 14-year-old son, and as a mother I could only imagine what it would be like if this were my child. I would want someone to do that for me,” Hill said.

Hill helped the family make the transportation and clinical arrangements. She cared for him during the flight and showed nurses in Guatemala how to perform the necessary suctioning of his stomach.

“Fourteen family members met us at the airport and when I saw the look on his mother’s face, I have never felt such a sense of satisfaction,” she said. “As a nurse, you touch people’s lives, but they touch yours, too. Every day you learn something new and sometimes you get to pat yourself on the back and know that you did something to help. When you love what you do, it’s not work.