When people learn about Bridget Ferns, RN, and her career, they invariably comment, “I don’t know how you do that.” Even the oncology nurse herself never thought she’d practice in pediatrics, but from the moment she walked into St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., for an interview 10 years ago, she knew it was the place to be.

“You always question ‘Why does this happen to innocent little lives?’ ” Ferns said, “but they’re some of the strongest people and they have a lot to teach us.”

Ferns’ position is triage nurse, not in the sense of an emergency room, but as the first person pediatric cancer patients and their families meet at St. Jude.

“The first day, I’m like the express pass at Disney World,” she said. “I’m usually with them, getting them from one appointment to the next and trying to make it a little more pleasant, a little less stressful,” she said.

For ongoing patients, “I write every single kid’s name down that’s coming to the clinic to try to check in with them to see if they need anything, if there are any problems, if there are ways we can improve and make things a little bit better.”

Ferns is quick to credit everyone, from physicians and nurses to food service and custodial staff—and especially the Child Life specialists—for keeping life as normal as possible for St. Jude’s 4,000 active patients. “We all work as a team regardless of our position,” she said.

“We’re not here to collect a paycheck. Everybody is here because we want to be. We believe in the mission of the hospital and we believe we’re making a difference in these kids’ lives,” she said.

St. Jude, with a staff from 34 countries, is unique in that it accepts any insurance a family may have as payment, regardless of what it does not cover. Those without insurance are not turned away or asked to pay.

Most patients are outpatients. The hospital has 56 licensed beds and the census is typically about 80 percent. “We try to keep them outpatient as much as possible, unless they’re getting chemotherapy or they have surgery,” Ferns said.

“My friends over there, the Child Life people, are working hard getting ready for Christmas and Hanukkah and arranging presents and Santa Clauses,” she said in early December. “The staff gets into the holidays. We all dress up and decorate.”

Ferns is among the biggest boosters of the Child Life staff, which focuses on patients’ total experience. They provide group activities—including some geared only for teenagers—and put on medical plays to help children and siblings understand what they’re going through. Using distraction and other techniques, the specialists help patients through procedures and tests that, Ferns said, “are not a lot of fun. Like peripheral IV sticks.”

“We have some bad days. We have a lot of good days,” she said.

For a little more than four years, Ferns, 32, worked in organ transplant at St. Jude, then spent the next five years in the bone marrow transplant clinic before becoming the hospital’s ultimate patient and family advocate about eight months ago.

“Most of these kids had a normal, healthy childhood,” until something like an exam after a football practice turned up a brain tumor, she said. Or, “You have this healthy, normal child who all of a sudden can’t walk.

“Their whole world gets turned upside down, not just emotionally and psychologically, but financially. You split families because, of course, one parent usually ends up having to work. Our goal here is to make things as normal as possible and keep everything going.”

At first, Ferns, who one day would like to be a nursing instructor, was reluctant to single out any patient as particularly memorable. “There’s no way. Every one has touched me so deeply,” she said.

But then she shared: “This one particular patient, he was about 16 years old and it was just him and his mom. He was kind of a big ol’ country boy football player who didn’t have a whole lot of support. He felt a little isolated and we made a quick connection. We used to spend time together just talking.

“At one point, he had made plans with another patient and they were going to fly out to California and drive up California’s coast and eventually go up into Oregon.”

(Ferns grew up in the Portland area and earned a bachelor’s degree from Linfield-Good Samaritan School of Nursing.)

“I had told him I would fly out and meet him and we could go around together and do some fun things. I could show him around and stuff. And, of course, he relapsed and subsequently passed away.

“I had a very difficult time with his passing because we had made this connection that was very deep.”

Soon afterward, though, she had a dream in which the boy let her know that he was OK. “It was a visual thing,” Ferns said, and she shared the dream with his mother.

From that experience, Ferns can answer those who question how she is emotionally able to work with young cancer patients.

“Your first patient that you really get attached to kind of makes you or breaks you in this field,” she said.

And she didn’t break.

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.