Called To Care

By Cindy Starr

Post Staff Reporter

''I'm sorry, buddy,'' Michele Neat said as she used a swab to clean around the tube in 5-year-old Dakota Killough's neck. Dakota's anguished eyes looked into Ms. Neat's caring eyes, and he pounded his little feet together. Dakota did not say anything - he has never been able to talk, and his airway had been reconstructed the day before - but his feelings were clear.

Ms. Neat, a highly trained clinical nurse at Children's Hospital Medical Center, went through two dozen swabs while cleaning, then drying, around Dakota's tube. When she wasn't reassuring Dakota, she was talking to his parents, who had brought him up from Waxahachie, Texas, and both sets of grandparents, who hovered near the bed. Her mind juggled questions, advice and reassurance, while her hands never stopped moving.

On a day when she allowed a Post reporter to follow her, Ms. Neat herself never stopped moving. It all comes with the territory, she said.

''I'm a really compassionate person and I like the caring aspect of nursing,'' Ms. Neat said later, reflecting on her work. ''It kind of sounds corny, but I like taking care of people, helping them get through a difficult time.''

Ms. Neat, who graduated from Sycamore High School and holds a bachelor of science in nursing from the University of Cincinnati, is an ideal nurse. She combines high-tech skills with low-tech heart to deliver a premier blend of health care. Beloved by pediatric patients and their parents, she is motivated by a need to make people better and, in the process, the world a little better, too. Her work is more a calling than a job.

The medical community, in the midst of a serious and ongoing nursing shortage, needs more people willing to answer that call.

Ms. Neat said she has wanted to be a nurse ever since she can remember. She was inspired by the nurses she met when, at age 6, she came to Children's Hospital because of a leg disease. And she was inspired by her grandmother, ''who took care of anybody who was sick in our family.'' Had her grandmother gone to college, Ms. Neat speculated, ''probably she would have been a nurse.''

Ms. Neat, 30, works in one of the most challenging settings at Children's: T6B, a high-acuity, high-observation area in which patients are recovering from organ transplants, trauma and airway difficulties.

On a recent daytime shift she was assigned to Dakota and two other patients: Brianna Jackson, a 10-year-old from Lexington, Ky., who had undergone a liver transplant six days earlier, and Isiah Brown, a 10-year-old liver transplant patient from Toledo, who had returned to the hospital because of a low platelet count.

Ms. Neat spent most of her day juggling the needs of her three patients. In addition, she answered the phone, helped periodically with other patients and updated medical records.

During one tense interlude, beginning at 9:55 a.m., she was helping Isiah when she was summoned by Dakota, whose tube, embedded in his trachea, needed suctioning.

At 10 a.m., after suctioning Dakota, she was summoned by Brianna, who was having pain.

''I'll be back,'' Ms. Neat said - a recurrent phrase - while leaving Dakota's room.

''This is the way it always is,'' she noted, once out the door. ''Everybody needs everything at once.''

But Ms. Neat enjoys the fast pace.

''I think that's what keeps you going,'' she said. ''It's challenging. It sounds bad to say, but I like taking care of the more complex patients, people who are sicker and have a lot of needs. And that's the children as well as the families. I spend a lot of time talking with the families. They sometimes have more of a need than the patient.''

During those luxurious periods when she could do just one thing at a time, the rushing stopped and her bedside manner, almost ministerial, came to the fore. She spent several minutes trying to rouse Isiah, who was in a deep morning sleep but needed to take his medicine, then waited patiently as he swallowed his pills at a snail's pace.

She also took time to examine Brianna's new cosmetics packet, a gift that included shower gel, shampoo and an exotic concoction called Blueberry Blastoff. ''You put it on your face and it makes you sparkle,'' Brianna explained.

Ms. Neat admired (and sniffed) every product, then brought over Brianna's breakfast, which was wrapped in a plastic shell. As Ms. Neat began removing the tape that enclosed the shell, Brianna began an impromptu prayer. Ms. Neat stopped and listened.

''I'm blessed,'' Brianna said. ''I bless the Lord that he gave me the energy and power to do all this stuff and not be weak and lie in my bed and not be able to play with my friends.''

Only after Brianna had finished did Ms. Neat begin pulling at the tape again.

She lingered in Brianna's room, comforting her, holding her hand, and talking to her mother, who had to return to Lexington that morning to deal with another family matter. ''Will you come back tonight? So we won't have to worry about you?'' Ms. Neat asked.

When a nurse leaves a room, she washes her hands to avoid spreading germs from one patient to another. Twice Ms. Neat washed her hands as she prepared to leave Brianna and twice she returned to Brianna's bedside. After washing her hands a third time she finally left the room, not with annoyance but with the calm that comes with a job well done.

''I go home thinking I've done something to make a difference for somebody,'' she said later. ''Every day there are several things you could pick out and say, 'There, that made a difference.' ''

This article posted October 2, 2000.

Called To Care

Transplant News