Cindy Bales discovered what a hospital is like at 16, when her 15-year-old brother had successful open-heart surgery.
"I spent a lot of time with him in recovery. It was a teaching hospital, so we had interns and doctors visiting his room, but it was the nurses who really taught us and answered our questions," said Bales, ADN, RN, a charge nurse in the women's unit at WellStar Kennestone Hospital.
Bales, 50, graduated with her nursing degree from Samford University in 1983.
“In my heart, this is what I know I was meant to do. Hospital nursing is where I want to be,” Bales said.
Bales, who has worked in pulmonary, cardiac, intensive care, medical/surgical and women’s units, has become a master of what she calls “out-of-the-box nursing.”
“You don’t start out knowing everything that patients want or need. It takes time for you to get comfortable in your skin as a nurse,” she said.
Bales went way outside the box when she learned that a new mother she was caring for had a husband with Stage 4 colon cancer who was being treated in the hospital’s oncology unit. Bales wanted to bring the family together, so she began taking steps to make it happen.
Bales told her supervisor that she was willing to take on the husband as a patient on the women’s unit, provided it could be worked out with his chemotherapy nurses. The nurses agreed to come to the women’s unit to administer treatments while his wife was in the hospital.
“It was 2 a.m., but we all worked together to make it happen,” Bales said. “When you’re a floor nurse, you’re only as good as your team. If I need to spend more time with a patient, I know other nurses in my unit will pick up the slack with my other patients.”
So while Bales settled the young mother and her baby into a room off a quiet back hallway, oncology nurses brought her husband to the room next door.
“As I was getting him settled into bed, my team was getting her and the baby into a wheelchair so they could come visit,” Bales said. “I decided that most of my assessment could wait. I left after she arrived, to give them some privacy.”
Bales discovered that the wife found out she was pregnant with her second child just two days after her husband’s cancer diagnosis. Relocating the father in the women’s unit made it possible for the couple’s 2-year-old to visit more often.
Although he was weak, the father held his new baby for short time periods, and they were together as a family.
“Seeing the grins on their faces told me that what we did was right. Those smiles were a gift to me,” Bales said. “Certain patients you never forget. They take up a part of your heart and live there.”
In nominating Bales, nurse manager Nancy Carper and Philidah Seda, executive director of Women’s Services Nursing, wrote that she epitomized what nurses strive to do — “to engage in caring acts, to do purposeful and worthwhile work, and to really make a difference in customers’ lives.”
