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Children's nurses sew comforting reminder
By WAVENEY ANN MOORE © St. Petersburg Times, published May 6, 2001 ST. PETERSBURG -- With its whimsical figures and succinct, emotive words, the gently hued quilt they've made represents the very fabric of their profession, say nurses Carol Blodgett and Leisa Baptiste-Rice. Thirty-six carefully stitched squares carry brown bears, blond angels, hearts, a butterfly, stars, a little girl hugging a doll. Accompanying each image is a word -- give, teach, motivate, hug, comfort. During National Nurses Week, which begins today and ends on Florence Nightingale's birthday, May 12, the quilt created by Mrs. Blodgett and Mrs. Baptiste-Rice will hang outside the cafeteria at All Children's Hospital, where the two women are employed. They hope it will later be displayed permanently outside the waiting room of the intensive care unit, where they work the 12-hour night shift. "I really wanted the nurses of our hospital to be recognized for what they do. I wanted there to be some sort of symbol of what we do in nursing. We do teach. We do advocate. We do love. We do comfort," said Mrs. Baptiste-Rice, who has worked at All Children's for 11 years. "Since it's National Nurses Week, we just thought it would be an ideal time to say not just what All Children's nurses do or what intensive care nurses do," Mrs. Blodgett added. "We just wanted to say we are here 24-7 for everybody." The quilt is one of several projects the friends, who are passionate about their profession, have devised to help those whose lives they touch. They want to organize a program to give what they are calling comfort quilts to long-term patients in their unit. The two women also want to paint angels on memory boxes, which hold treasured keepsakes such as a lock of hair or handprints and footprints of a child who has died, and are presented to families who want them. Though it was her idea to create the National Nurses Week quilt, Mrs. Baptiste-Rice does little sewing. So it was that when they started talking about the quilt, the friends knew exactly how the labor on it would be divided. Mrs. Blodgett would draw and paint the images on the 6-inch quilt squares and stitch them together. Cheri Samon, owner of the Quilting Bee, a shop at 8842 Fourth St. N, agreed to quilt the three layers of fabric -- top, batting and lining -- on her 14-foot-long quilting machine. Mrs. Baptiste-Rice's job was to put words to images and add three-dimensional touches such as locks of synthetic, blond hair and wings to the tiny angels. Mrs. Blodgett, who has been sewing most of her life and began making quilt tops about two years ago, has created other projects for the intensive care unit. "We have a conference room there that was bare, so I was asked if I could make some banners to decorate it. So I made one for each month of the year. Out of that came an idea to do the quilt," said Mrs. Blodgett, 51. "Leisa came up to me a couple of months ago and said, since it was National Nurses Month in May, wouldn't it be nice if we could make a quilt. She would come up with some ideas and we would make the quilt together." A nurse for 11 years, Mrs. Blodgett returned to college after marriage and graduated at age 40. A few years after her husband died, she moved from their home in Indiana to Florida. Mrs. Baptiste-Rice, 31, had long wanted to be a nurse. As a child, she was inspired by her grandmother, who became a nurse in her 40s. Later, she admired the dedication of All Children's nurses, who cared for her teenage sister, Brooke Angelo, who died of complications from chicken pox while in remission from leukemia. "I am very blessed to have been chosen," Mrs. Baptiste-Rice said of her vocation. "I really think that God chooses you to do things in your life. It really is my calling. I am good at what I do and I am very blessed to have a job that I like." As nurses in All Children's ICU unit, she and Mrs. Blodgett care for patients who have undergone surgery. "We take heart transplants from babies all the way to bypass surgery on adults and then any other child that has surgery. We are not only dealing with patients, we are also dealing with family members," Mrs. Blodgett said. "Our goal would be to have the quilt hung in the main hallway outside of the family waiting room. The families wait there while surgery is going on. Children too. So the parents will have something visually to look at and the siblings and any family member will get a little reassurance from that that the nurse taking care of their family member really cares." Mrs. Blodgett and Mrs. Baptiste-Rice are looking forward to the piece going on display in its permanent home. "We're working with our maintenance department to get a Plexiglas compartment to put it in," Mrs. Baptiste-Rice said. They want the quilt to be a lasting tribute to their profession. "I think," said Mrs. Blodgett, as she sat in the Quilting Bee on Thursday afternoon, "we want this to be fun, educational." "Comforting," interjected her friend. "That's a good word," Mrs. Blodgett agreed, "to families, friends and staff." And added Mrs. Baptiste-Rice, "It just shows that we're proud of what we do."
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