Memorial Announces Cassi Duhon, RN February 2023 DAISY Winner
- Category: Awards/Recognition
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Congratulations to Cassi Duhon, RN, a team member in the Neonatal ICU at Lake Charles Memorial Hospital! She was nominated by a patient's family for her compassion and attentive care.
From the Nominator:
Our sweet baby was born at 34 and 5 in an emergency situation. Once she made it to NICU, the entire team was wonderful and attentive to her medical needs and helped us understand everything that was going on with her. Cassi was attentive to those needs, but she went above and beyond to help us feel comfortable and to show our baby care as an individual, not just a patient.
After helping us bathe our baby, she said she had to add some things to her bed to help her feel better. She left and returned with a cute little bow and told us we had to choose between 2 blankets, one she found and thought matched our girl's personality, the other she said matched our lives because the night before we told her how we play music and sing together and this blanket had music stuff all over it! How sweet that she saw something that reminded her of our conversation, still thought of whom our little love is growing into, and brought us options for cuteness -- in a time where nobody else was thinking of cute stuff for her that she could actually have right now, we were all just working on keeping her healthy.
Cassi asked permission and then took and sent me sweet photos of our girl from all kinds of angles with that precious bow + her new personality blanket. This sweet blanket change for the next few days brought me so much joy because Cassi was right, it matched our little love's happy personality so well with the bright yellows and sweet sunflowers! Each night of her rotation, Cassi went out of her way to come to check on us and help us feel some normality in the midst of all this emergency care.
About DAISY:
In late 1999, at the age of 33, Patrick Barnes awoke with some blood blisters in his mouth. Having survived Hodgkins Disease twice, he was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with the auto-immune disease, ITP (Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura).
Said his father, Mark Barnes, "We are so blessed that we were able to spend the eight weeks of his hospitalization with him and his family. During those weeks, we experienced the best of Nursing. We were there to see the clinical skill that dealt with his very complex medical situation, the fast thinking of nurses who saved his life more than once, and that nursing excellence that took years to hone to the best of the profession. But frankly, as a patient family, we rather expected that Pat would have great clinical care. That was why he was in the hospital. What we did not expect was the way his nurses delivered that care - the kindness and compassion they gave Pat and all of us in his family every day. We were awed by the way the nurses touched him and spoke with him, even when he was on a ventilator and totally sedated. The way they informed and educated us eased our minds. They truly helped us through the darkest hours of our lives, with soft voices of hope and strong loving hugs that to this day, we still feel."
Just days after he died, the family began talking about what they would do to help fill the giant hole in their hearts that Pat’s passing had left. His wife came up with the acronym, DAISY, standing for diseases attacking the immune system. As they discussed what to do in Patrick’s memory, first and foremost, they wanted to say Thank You for the gifts nurses give their patients and families every day. That is when the family created The DAISY Award For Extraordinary Nurses.
