I have been at St. Anthony’s going on 2 years now, when I arrived I was unsure of what to expect as I had been at Morton Plant for my entire career. It has been my greatest honor to manage this beautiful field of Daisies. There is not a day that goes by that I do not witness DAISY Award-worthy care and compassion here. It happens so frequently that I cannot pick out one event or one nurse because there are just so many. We see many patients from the very young to the old who are told that they have cancer and no matter how old you are, hearing the words “I’m sorry, you have cancer” takes their breath away.

My team has loved patients from every walk of life, to the well-off to the homeless, and seeing their care and compassion takes MY breath away. This team has paid for things out of their own pocket to see to it that they can get home to die with their families, and they have held the hands of the homeless when there were no resources or family to send them home to. I have received more letters and cards than I can count from patients that are now no longer with us and families that have come to visit to thank them for helping them get through the hardest time of their lives.

One of our nurses went and got a picture of a patient’s sycamore tree in his backyard and blew it up, and taped it up next to his bed because he had begged her to take him home so that he could die there. She then sat there with him, holding his hand in his last hour as he passed away under the sycamore tree.

Another nurse had T-shirts made for one of our patients who had to come and stay with us every month for 2 weeks for his treatment. He has since passed away, but he was family to our team.

We had a very young girl on our floor for a very long time who had metastatic breast cancer who was not giving up for anything in the world, she fought with everything that she had but the cancer eventually began to take her. As she left on a stretcher on her way to the Hospice facility, the whole team lined the hall to say goodbye. This team invests everything they have into every patient.

One day I was sitting in my office and the next thing I knew 6 nurses including my Assistant Nurse Manager, came running into my office, each of them sobbing when I asked what had happened, they told me that they had just witnessed the son of one of our patients laying his head on his dying mother’s lap sobbing and crying out for his mother.

One of my nurses came in on her day off to comb the knot out of the hair of a patient who was dying from cervical cancer so that she would look good when she saw her children.

The other night we received a Jane Doe from the EC with chemical burns all over her legs, she had been picked up by EMS from a park bench after people had reported that she had been lying there for 3 days. The patient came up at midnight, and the whole team jumped in to help even our day secretary helped to run and get items and helped calm her as the team cleaned her raw burnt skin. The patient was screaming and difficult, but the team spoke to her with such kindness and showed her such dignity that I felt like crying.

Although my team doesn’t ask for any awards, I would just love it if my field of DAISIES could be recognized with a DAISY Team Award.