During her first year out of nursing school Sharon Pearce was working in the neurology department and had a patient in the intensive care unit. She’d been in a terrible car accident that had left her brain-dead. She was 19 years old.

As she cared for the patient, she developed a relationship with her family. She was only 21 at the time. She just tried to be there for them. She encouraged them to talk to their daughter, to hold her hand, to tell her how much they loved her. She also spent a lot of time easing their fears as best she could, explaining to them what all of the machines their daughter was hooked up to were doing for her.

When it was clear this young girl wasn’t going to improve, her parents made the decision to stop the ventilator and donate her organs. During this sad time of that family, she tried to be as empathetic as possible, doing whatever she could for them during this most stressful, sad moment of their lives.

A few weeks later, Sharon’s boss shared a handwritten letter with her that the girl’s parents wrote, expressing their gratitude for her work. One line read: Sharon Pearce helped my family through a very trying time. Without her honest feelings of care and sympathy, I think we could not have taken the loss of our daughter, Tina, as easily.

This letter serves as a reminder of the many ways that the role of nurse’s impact patients.

—Sharon Pearce, CRNA, MSN, president of the American Association of Nurse Anaesthetists and CRNA at Carolina Anaesthesia and Associates