Comfort Found Amid Childhood Pain Helps Lead UA Graduate to Nursing Career

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Melissa Allen has never wanted her sometimes painful, incurable disease to define her life, but the compassionate nursing care she received as a frightened, hospitalized child helped crystallize her career choice. Within a week of her graduation from The University of Alabama on May 10, this 22-year-old woman is scheduled to begin her nursing career in the special care unit of Children’s Hospital in Birmingham.

Allen has coped with Crohn’s disease, which causes inflammation throughout the entire digestive tract, since she was 11.

“I was in and out of the hospital for months at the time,” the Capstone College of Nursing graduation candidate recalled. “In the hospital, the nurses were the ones that helped me out and gave me hope and helped me understand there was an end to all the madness. They were the ones that made me realize that there are positive sides to any disease. I hope that one day I can be the same kind of influence on a child’s life.”

Allen is scheduled to graduate alongside the classmates she entered UA’s nursing college with in 2000, despite undergoing two major operations since last summer. She adheres to a schedule that includes daily medications and diet restrictions.

Despite the challenges, Allen has not only succeeded, but excelled, as a nursing student. The College recently presented her with its Most Outstanding Senior award. Dr. Angela Collins, associate professor of nursing at UA, says Allen and success will continue to be linked.

“Melissa has two attributes that will make her an outstanding nurse,” Collins said. “First, she listens in such a way that the patient knows that they are being cared about and understood. She tunes into the little things like the way the patient prefers for their hair to be brushed or their most comfortable position.

“She gets down on the floor with children and relates to their point of view. Second, Melissa embodies caring. To me she is a part of a circle of caring. She is using her story of overcoming physical pain as a framework for being a compassionate nurse.”

Allen, who grew up in the Atlanta suburb of Snellville, Ga., is also the beneficiary of having an interest and an aptitude in one of the nation’s hottest professions.

According to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, more than one million new and replacement nurses will be needed by 2012. According to another recent report, more than 30 states now face Registered Nurse shortages, and 44 states are expected to have shortages by 2020.

Potential nurses are responding to the shortage. Fall 2003 enrollment in UA’s Capstone College of Nursing was 791 students, an all-time high in the College’s 27-year history, according to UA records. The record enrollment was driven, in part, by 165 freshman students, representing a 135 percent increase from the freshman class of three years prior.

Despite her recent surgeries and other challenges, Allen considers the toughest battles to be those of her middle-school years. It was then that intravenous feedings and facial swelling from the necessary corticosteroids use co-existed alongside with the need to keep up with school work. But even then, Allen said, she lived a relatively typical life, immersed in school and extracurricular activities.

“I didn’t want the disease to run my life. I wanted to be in charge. Not many people know that I have Crohn’s disease, it’s something that I don’t really talk about unless it’s brought up.”

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, known collectively as inflammatory bowel diseases, affect up to one million Americans, including approximately 100,000 children, according to the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America’s Web site.

Allen said it’s hard to guess whether she would have become a nurse had she not had the disease, but she said she hopes her personal experiences will make her a better one than she otherwise might have been.

“Being around the medical field has been a big part of my life. I hope it will make me more aware of the patients’ feelings. I want to make a difference in the lives of my patients. In working with children, I want them to see that it’s not going to be this way for the rest of their lives,” she said.