I received “the call” from a mutual acquaintance of my future Whitney Young High School patient/student on my cell phone. I was about to not pick it up. It was the middle of the Covid pandemic and RSV flu season. I received many calls asking me to take ventilator nursing jobs, even though I already had one, well before the Covid pandemic. I had been a nurse for 21 years at that point and I wanted to quit. I was an only child. I had two elderly parents. They were scared for me. I was scared for them. I just had received word that my father would need 3 surgeries the following year, one where part of his scalp would be removed. He was an army veteran who had been involved in an explosion in the military where he had shrapnel.  After the military, he went to college and worked at the Smithfield Plant for nearly 45 years. My mother had worked in a bank in Chicago for 25 years, then became a teacher’s aide for another 20 years. Both were retired.

     But instead, I took the call: “We have a child who has not been to school in 3 months. He is a Whitney Young High School student with severe respiratory issues. We know you are a ventilator nurse who works with patients with severe respiratory difficulty. Would you be willing to take the job and be a one-to-one nurse for this child?”

     “Why don’t you do a meet and greet? If you really want to walk away, you can,” he said.

     My logic said, “Quit nursing like everybody else.” My heart and spirit said, “Go and see this family.”

     “When and where would the meeting take place,” I asked.