A former babysitter, camp counselor and nanny, Gaby Sussman always knew she wanted to work with children. She just had to decide between a career in education or nursing.

“I finally chose nursing because I liked science and it seemed to offer more variety, but there was never any doubt that pediatrics was my specialty,” she said.

A nurse in the neurology and cranial/facial unit at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite for the last six years, Sussman sees plenty of variety. Her patients range from newborns to 21-year-olds and they suffer from various conditions, including multiple seizures, facial anomalies, head injuries, brain tumors and other illnesses.

Sussman knows how to relate to her young patients and speaks their language. If a child has a stuffed animal, she’ll treat it first. Teddy bears often sport IV tubes and head bandages, just like their owners.

“You want children to be comfortable and pain-free, but the acuity level of many of our patients is very high, and when you consider the state of their parents, you sometimes have three patients in a room. It’s your job to take care of everyone,” she said.

A brain tumor is a difficult diagnosis for parents and children. A child who doesn’t seem very sick before surgery can come out of the operating room in a fragile state.

Last summer, Sussman was the postsurgical nurse for Frannie Geeslin, a 14-year-old diagnosed with a massive brain tumor. Frannie underwent two craniotomies, lasting more than 20 hours, and spent a month in the hospital recovering.

“My husband, Jim, and I were terrified. We did not know what would happen to our little girl. Frannie had nine IVs and a drain line coming out of her brain,” the girl’s mother, Shea Geeslin, wrote in her nomination. “The first time Gaby came into our room she brought with her a palpable sense of human compassion.”

Sussman said that nurses can become desensitized to medical diagnoses, but never to the young patients and families who live with them.

“As a nurse, you know the road that they are going to have to go down,” she said.

Answering questions from anxious parents is part of the job.

“You are there to lend an ear and you learn to sense how much information they want or need,” Sussman said. “When a family is hurting, everything else can wait.”

Sussman not only cared for Frannie medically; she dropped in frequently to help raise the family’s spirits. After surgery, the nurse spent three hours carefully washing the teenager’s hair .

“She made the worst days of our lives bearable,” Geeslin said.

Sussman loves being a nurse, and caring for children seems to come naturally to her.

“I like being able to talk and joke with them and to ease their pain, but the most rewarding part is seeing them get better,” she said. “Frannie and her mom stopped by to say hello the other day. It was wonderful to see her walk in wearing street clothes and to know she was no longer a patient.”