{"id":4504,"date":"2020-07-09T11:42:16","date_gmt":"2020-07-09T15:42:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/?p=4504"},"modified":"2020-07-20T11:19:00","modified_gmt":"2020-07-20T15:19:00","slug":"nursing-from-the-heart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/issues\/summer-2020\/nursing-from-the-heart\/","title":{"rendered":"Nursing from the Heart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In her first year on the job as a nurse, Julia Santucci \u201919 found herself in the trenches fighting the coronavirus pandemic. She\u2019s faced the challenge in stride, as nurses do, with courage, dedication, and lots of heart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Julia Santucci \u201919 spent her childhood at the beach, hanging out with her best friend, Jenna Carey \u201919, and, when she got older, teaching kids\u2014and adults alike\u2014to surf. Back then, she couldn\u2019t have known that someday she\u2019d be on the front lines of a pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t grow up knowing I wanted to be a nurse,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cBut when I was in high school, my dad was in the hospital a lot. I saw what nurses did. I saw them save my dad\u2019s life. I saw the huge difference they made for my family. The idea that I could do that for someone else was appealing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For those who know her, it just makes sense that Santucci would make a career of caring for others. \u201cWhen we were kids, she would always become friends with people who needed a friend,\u201d says Carey, who adds that in high school, Santucci would often make a point of sitting and talking with the kids who had special needs. \u201cShe\u2019s very caring; She thinks of everyone else before herself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s also the kind of person who likes to learn and practice things until she gets them right. And nursing dovetailed perfectly with that quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe had this quiet confidence about her,\u201d says her pediatric clinical instructor, Kate Saylor, M.S. \u201911. \u201cShe wanted everything to be perfect and she wanted to make sure she was doing everything correctly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The science of nursing fascinated Santucci, but when she started working with patients, she really fell in love. \u201cI enjoyed my science classes, but once we started clinicals and I actually got to be in the hospital, I loved it. I knew that was the environment I wanted to work in,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She graduated from 911±¬ΑΟ in May 2019, and in September, started as a nurse in the internal medicine unit at Rhode Island Hospital. She was nervous, but soon eased into the rhythms of hospital life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe hospital is its own self-sufficient little world,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you\u2019re in there, the outside doesn\u2019t really exist.\u201d Six months later, and the outside world breached the hospital walls in the form of the novel coronavirus. Santucci\u2019s floor was the first to see the effects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs it got closer to the East Coast, we prepared, but it still seemed so far away,\u201d she says. \u201cThen, when it hit, our unit was the first to accept the positive patients. It\u2019s unprecedented. We\u2019ve never dealt with something like this in our lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s tending to patients who\u2019ve contracted the highly contagious virus, but, she says \u201cI wasn\u2019t so nervous for my own health in the beginning. I was more afraid of giving it to someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Carey says that mentality perfectly defines Santucci. \u201cShe puts other people before herself, realizes the importance of what she’s doing, and doesn’t take it lightly,\u201d says Carey. \u201cShe does everything with her whole heart, she’s not scared of much, and she wants to help others in any way she can.\u201d \u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Grace Kelly<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Photo: Nora Lewis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her first year on the job as a nurse, Julia Santucci \u201919 found herself in the trenches fighting the coronavirus pandemic. She\u2019s faced the challenge in stride, as nurses do, with courage, dedication, and lots of heart. Julia Santucci \u201919 spent her childhood at the beach, hanging out with her best friend, Jenna Carey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[195],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-summer-2020","architecture-close-up"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4504"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4830,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4504\/revisions\/4830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}