Portrait of a Tender #12 - Erin - UVA Coronary Care Unit

Cari's grandmother was a nurse and her grandfather was a doctor. They  inspired in Cari a desire to tend to others and to work in healthcare some day.  For a while she thought she wanted to be a doctor until she earned a "C" in her college Chemistry class.  Her advisor encouraged her to go into teaching instead and she went on to earn a Master's of Arts in Teaching Spanish.  She taught for 7 years, until she ultimately decided she wanted to fulfill her childhood dream of working in healthcare.

She left teaching and began taking her prerequisite courses for nursing school, one of them being Chemistry again. This time around, Cari earned the highest grade in her class.  Her teacher was so impressed with her performance that he encouraged her to consider a career in Chemistry, but Cari was determined to reach her goal of becoming a nurse.

She was accepted into UVA's Clinical Nurse Leader program in 2012.  

Her grandfather fell ill soon after from cardiac disease and the last thing she was able to tell him before he passed away was that she had been accepted into UVA's School of Nursing.  She was finally going to achieve their shared dream.

Cari graduated in 2014 and excepted an RN position on the Coronary Care Unit at UVA Health and she has been there ever since.

Working through the pandemic brought a host of challenges to an already high stress job.  Patients in the Coronary Care Unit are being treated for serious heart problems, and life threatening emergencies are a frequent occurrence.   During the pandemic, nurses were expected to incorporate new and constantly shifting protocols into the daily regimen.  The protocols involving Covid sometimes changed daily and sometimes changed based on the availability of equipment.  The workload increased significantly while the pay remained the same.  During the shutdown, most people were either working from home or staying home with pandemic pay, but not the nurses.  The nurses were still going to work as they always had, working harder and longer, taking care of sicker patients, risking their own lives, and doing it all for the exact same pay they had always received.  This was the expectation and Cari not only met that expectation, she exceeded it.