“Zeuf”

Nurse of the Year

For Robin Janiszeufski-Hesson, R.N., an important part of going through breast cancer was that, as a patient lying in her hospital bed, she gained a perspective she might otherwise have missed in caring for her own patients.

“When a person is afraid of an IV or wants another explanation of their lab tests or their family is terrified, I’m there,” says the Community Hospital critical care nurse. “The most important thing about being a nurse is the ability to never lose compassion for what I’m doing. Being a patient was very humbling; it made me much more sensitive to what people might be going through.”

It is this compassion and dedication, among other attributes, that earned “Zeuf,” as she is known to her colleagues, the winning nomination for Nurse of the Year 2004.

The award was as much a shock as an honor for the self-effacing nurse, whose 17-year career began at an inner-city trauma center at Highland Hospital in Oakland and has continued for the past 10 years in critical and intensive care at Community Hospital.

“There’s a huge difference between where I came from and Community Hospital,” she says. “CHOMP is a beautiful, clean hospital, and the staff is very well taken care of. It’s a great place to work. I appreciate my job because I like intervening when it really counts — not to say that nothing else counts, but when critical decisions have to be made quickly, western medicine is really good in interventional treatment.”

Zeuf and her husband Richard, better known as Frosty, brought a whole other meaning to “intervention” when they helped start the “Ride a Wave” program in which experienced surfers take out various groups of people whose illnesses or other maladies would normally prevent them from experiencing the ocean.

“I love to surf,” she says, “and my husband is a big wave rider. This program enables us to share this love with people who might otherwise never know what it is to ride a wave: kids with cancer, people who have disfiguring burns, paraplegic and quadriplegic people, mentally disadvantaged adults, and autistic children. The highlight of my life is that I get to use being a nurse in every part of my life. It’s a great profession and a very important life path.”