DAISY Award—Kristine Weidner, R.N.

Kristine Weidner, R.N.
Davis 8 Oncology/BMTU

I would first like to state that this submission is not only my own but the work of our entire unit, struggling to heal and fill the hole that was left when our beloved Kristine "Kris" Weidner passed away unexpectedly in the fall of 2021.

Kris has often been described as the heart of our unit. For many of us, she was more than a friend or colleague. She was a shining example of everything we continue to hope to be, not only as a person, but especially as a nurse.

Kris had a smile and a laugh that would light up a room, there is no shortage of times where a patient was comforted by her smile or knew that things would be ok simply because she shared her completely soul warming laugh with them.

Kris was a veteran nurse. She had been an oncology and bone marrow transplant nurse for over 30 years. There is no one on our unit that was left untouched by her knowledge, care, and love for her patients. After all, she had been on this unit longer than any other single person who currently works here. When Kris passed, we quickly developed a sort of family tree in order to trace every employee who works on this unit back to her. Everyone was a preceptee of Kris or was precepted by someone that Kris had trained. It is truly a legacy of love and caring that she leaves with us.

There are many things that you can teach a nurse, but some qualities a person either inherently has or doesn’t have. Whatever it is, Kris had it in spades. Kris was born to be an oncology nurse. I wish there was a way to quantify how many lives Kris has touched through her career: oncology patients that survived and credit her with helping them find the strength to reach survivorship, bone marrow transplant patients who think of her when they think of their time confined to a room with only four walls where they waited for a month for their cell counts to recover, patients whose hand she held as they left this life and transitioned to the next. How many bags of chemotherapy did she give throughout her career? How many bags of stem cells did she infuse? These are things I do not know the answer to, but what I do know is this: there will never be another like her. While the pain of a loss of such a beautiful life pains me for our unit and especially our patients, I think what hurts the most is that there will continue to be an influx of new patients and new nurses that will never know her.

Before writing this submission, I asked people for their stories about how Kris had impacted them, our patients, or their nursing practice. Things that were stated repeatedly were her kindness, how she would take time to debrief with nurses, patients, and their families after traumatic events, how her hugs could heal what chemotherapy couldn’t, and how every movement and action she made was intentional, filled with love and compassion that she shared with us and her patients.