For my health professional interview I interviewed Sarah Satink, an acute care nurse practitioner in a 15 bed Intensive Care Unit at Sentara in Williamsburg. Her title is Sarah Satink MSN RN, AGACNP-BC, CCRN. Which means she has her masters in nursing (MSN RN), she is an adult gerontology acute care nurse practitioner who is board certified (ACACNP-BC), she carries a speciality in critical care nursing (CCRN).
Sarah has been a nurse since 1999. She’s always worked in critical care and thought she wanted to teach. Before moving to Virginia she lived in Ohio where she was teaching an associate professor in an LPN to RN program and also worked as an RN. Her plans were to get her masters in nursing education and continue teacher. However, when she moved to Virginia she was inspired when she saw how Nurse Practitioners were being used in critical care settings. “I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do so it inspired me to go back to graduate school and get my acute care NP.” said Sarah. She got to where she is today following a long but rewarding and educational path. She started off as a new graduate at the Cleveland Clinic working in the heart transplant Intensive Care Unit where she worked for 8 years. She then was recruited into the catheter lab where she worked as a cardiac catheter
lab nurse for another 5 years. Five years later Sarah move toVirginia and was nervous about working trauma because she had never worked anything but cardiac critical care. Sarah stated “It ended up being a great learning experience. It really rounded out my knowledge and skills in caring for any patients who were critically ill.” She then went back to graduate school in 2015 and graduated in February 2017.
The most rewarding and favorite thing to Sarah is how much she gets to help people. “That has always been what has driven me. It is not an easy job by any means. You can have a patient dying in one room and someone recovering in the other. You have to be able to cry in one room and comfort the family and maintain your professionalism in the other room. All while caring for these sick people. You have to be the eyes and ears for the physicians and they rely heavily on you to notice the small cues that let them know their patient is deteriorating before a crisis develops. There is no other feeling that your quick actions saving someone’s life.”, says Sarah. She thinks that a challenging part of being a new NP is that it is very hard to be the one in the provider role and be legally responsible for the patients. As a nurse she was able to make suggestions and demands of what she felt her patients needed. But now as an Np she is responsible for the diagnosis and prescribing the right treatment plans for the patient. Sarah says, “The hope is that you don’t overlook something or miss an important symptom that leads you down a different path. For instance, it becomes especially challenging with patients who are chronic drug abusers and deciphering what pain is real versus drug addiction.” On another note, she says telling a mother her son had passed away was the hardest part of her nursing career, “ He was in the ICU as a patient and went into cardiac arrest. While I ran the code, I had a nurse call her and tell her to come to the hospital right away. However, he passed before she got there and it was up to me to break the news to her.”
Sarah gave some final insights and advice that she’s gathered throughout her nursing career, “The beauty in the medical field is that it is so diverse. I love critical care and could never do pediatrics or labor and delivery. On the other hand there are people who feel the opposite of me. There are so many options and opportunities in both inpatient and the outpatient settings for people to be in the business of helping others. It is mentally and emotionally challenging. You sacrifice time with your on families to care for others who at times aren’t that always appreciative of you. However, to connect with people and help them through the worst moments or greatest triumph of their life is worth it all. My advice is to be ready to open your heart- you’ll cry sometimes and wonder why you do this and you’ll cry sometimes and know you were made for this. You become such a strong person and carry such a sense of pride knowing you’ve helped someone and made a difference in someone else’s life”
Sarah Satink Whelan
