From Grateful Patient to Proud Employee: Olivia’s Story

When Olivia graduated from Merrimack College and joined the Shriners Children’s Boston staff team as an inpatient nurse, she achieved a goal 10 years in the making.

Her burn treatment at the hospital as a young teen, and the nurses who cared for her, helped set the course for Olivia’s future. A decade later, she is now being mentored by some of those same nurses as she provides care to children impacted by burn injuries.

On a summer night when she was 13, Olivia went out on the back deck of her family’s home to ask her older brother a question. Home from college, he was outside with friends and began adding citronella oil to a tabletop firepot as Olivia approached. Suddenly it burst into flames, immediately burning her hands, chest and face. Thinking quickly, Olivia’s brother pushed her onto the outdoor couch and smothered the flames with a pillow. Olivia remembers being in shock and telling her parents she was okay when they rushed outside. They immediately drove her to their local hospital.

“My parents were really panicked, so I was trying not to be,” Olivia recalled. “I remember looking in the car mirror and I saw the burn on my face, then I looked down at my hands and saw the skin was starting to bubble. I was scared.” After it was determined that Olivia needed care at Shriners Children’s Boston, she was transported there by ambulance. Her wounds required debridement, removal of the damaged skin, and frequent dressing changes over the course of her week-long inpatient stay.

Olivia recalls how attentive the child life staff were to the kinds of music and movies she liked, playing her favorite band, One Direction, during the uncomfortable debridement procedure to make it more bearable. Although she was older than the other patients on the inpatient unit, Olivia befriended two younger boys who were also being treated for burn injuries. “Looking back, this is when I started to realize I wanted to work with children,” she said.