Everyone wins at these special weekends shared by nursing students — and some special patients.
Santana Lang is 23 and a Louisiana Tech senior from Covington. She will graduate this year with both her degree in nursing and a lifetime of precious memories. “My four years have been nothing short of amazing,” she said.
And yet on a weekend in early November, this soon-to-be professional nurse found herself in reverse, surprisingly taken back emotionally to her earliest longings to be the hands and feet of the needy. It taught her a lesson she hadn’t learned, one she couldn’t learn until now, a priceless gift that caught her by surprise and reminded her why she’d come to Tech to study nursing in the first place.
That weekend was a pivotal moment that solidified my aspirations to become a nurse. It reaffirmed my passion for helping others in a meaningful, hands-on way.
– Santana Lang
And it happened because of a disabled little girl, an innocent soul, reserved and nonverbal who, after trusting Lang, accepted her feeding tube and said clearly, “Thank you.”
The little girl laughed. Lang laughed too — and cried, “overwhelmed,” she said, “by the significance of being able to help in such a personal way and make her feel seen.”
Ella Grieder of Shreveport will graduate from Tech’s Division of Nursing in March. Like Lang, she shared the same weekend and the same back-to-the-beginning emotions.
“That weekend surpassed every expectation I had,” she said. “It gave me the chance to grow — not just as a nurse, but also to reconnect with the passion that had led me to nursing in the first place.”
Those experiences are replicated over and over, twice a year, at “that weekend,” the Heroes with Heart Retreat at MedCamps of Louisiana.
“We apply knowledge from the classroom to a clinical setting,” said Tech Associate Professor of Nursing Sarah McVay (pictured above with Heroes with Heart camper). “It’s the best way to develop ‘clinical reasoning,’ recognizing the uniqueness of each person and responding to their needs with the resources available.”
MedCamps at Camp Alabama in Choudrant serves as a recreational and educational camping experience for those living with chronic illnesses and disabilities. While MedCamps usually hosts family camp weekends, the twice-a-year Heroes with Heart weekends are for young campers and nursing students only.
The design is for campers to experience a weekend of fun while Tech’s nursing students, paired two-on-one with campers in a safe and comfortable setting, experience opportunities that increase their knowledge of both pediatric and family-centered care for children with chronic conditions.
When the students meet each camper’s parent or caregiver, they see a perspective they most likely have never considered. What does transportation look like for the child? What equipment is required? What medicine is needed, and when and how is it given?
“This is 24-hour care,” McVay said. “And maybe the biggest thing students ‘get’ is that while they are caring for a child today, that child will become an adult with the same issues. When the time comes, they can call on this experience when they care for adults with disabilities. They gain a new appreciation for what’s required.”
“Hands-on experience is the number one way for you to know if you have a true desire for that profession,” said Tech School of Design Associate Professor Whitney Causey, whose students created a colorful, feel-good mural at the Fire Station beside Camp Alabama last spring. Causey’s daughter M’Lynn has Angelman syndrome and was a Heroes with Heart camper in November.
“Having M’Lynn be a part of that weekend helped the students become more aware of what Angelman syndrome is,” said Causey of the rare neurogenetic disorder. “Most people have never heard of it; I’d never heard of it, it’s so rare. They become aware of the symptoms that come along with it and come to understand the beauty within and who M’Lynn is.”
While the students gain new perspectives and skills, “that weekend benefits the children because it brings them back to a place where they can be fully themselves without apologies or anything,” Causey said. “People accept them, and they have the most amazing time.”
Academically, Heroes with Heart earns students enrolled in Child Health Maintenance (pediatrics) 50 practicum hours. Emotionally, the weekends’ opportunities bring most students back to the passion and purpose of what McVay feels is a calling.
At MedCamps in the summer of 2017, the middle of her 20th year of nursing, McVay had just finished helping with a regular weeklong camp for children with like conditions when, in her exhaustion and gratification, she wondered how she could share with her Tech students a similar experience.
A quick and focused effort followed to make that idea a reality. Two years later, about 20 campers and twice that many nursing students shared the first 72-hours Heroes with Heart Retreat, a clinical opportunity unique among Louisiana colleges and universities.
“It’s my little piece of heaven I get to share with students,” McVay said. “I need patients: serving them fulfills my purpose. After this weekend, so many of our students are impacted in the same way. This weekend brings them back to the original reason they wanted to become a nurse. They feel it when they see the result on Sunday when the camper comes back to the parents and our students see the refreshed parents, but they also feel the payoff of the hard work they’ve enjoyed, caring for a child with multiple needs and seeing what that child needs to be successful.”
“I feel incredibly blessed that this opportunity came into my life, and I’m so thankful I got to meet (her camper) Carter,” Grieder said. “I’m grateful for Tech’s Nursing program and for MedCamps for helping us build the confidence we need to excel as nurses.”
Landon Barnes, 23, Tech senior from West Monroe, teamed with Grieder to care for Carter, a nonverbal boy diagnosed with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. After the two students completed a lengthy interview with Carter’s parents, who walked them through their son’s daily routine and medications and described his personality, it was Landon, Ella, and Carter.
The parents left. Carter began to cry. Well, more than that …
“Not a small sniffle cry,” Barnes said, “but a howling, gasping-for-air cry.”
After 30 seconds or so of panic from the pair, doing all they knew to comfort their young patient, Carter started “cackling,” Barnes said. “He was laughing … his parents had warned us he was a trickster, and he lived up to that very quickly.”
Barnes said his favorite part of the weekend was learning from Carter how a nonverbal patient “can communicate with you so well in other ways that you don’t even realize that they can’t speak at all. By the end of the weekend, we knew what was wrong if he was grimacing, or frowning, or when he would stick his tongue out and do what we called his ‘fishy face,’ or even act like he was asleep if he was uninterested in doing something.
“But his best form of communication,” Barnes said, “was his smile.”
Causey said she was “so thankful M’Lynn was invited to go to Heroes with Heart” because she left “using her speaking device more and communicating in new ways, really.
“So much of our world is not built for them,” Causey said. “They don’t socialize as much as you’d hope. And this weekend, this time, provides that for them.”
The reward has proven rich for everyone.
There is learning, but maybe more importantly, there is relationship. Barnes and Grieder are trying to decide when they can see their young practical-joker friend Carter again. They’re hopeful he’ll make his way from his New Orleans home to summer camp in Choudrant where the three can laugh together again.
“It’s not a question of ‘if’ I’ll be going back to MedCamps,” Barnes said. “It’s ‘when.’ And I pray it’s soon.”
