LAKEVIEW REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER, COVINGTON, LOUISIANA– Life can be stressful at times. One nurse has an interesting way of dealing with some of the strain of being a health professional.
Kristen Johnson has traveled the country to places like Connecticut, California, Illinois and Hawaii. She was a traveling neonatal nurse that is now a lactation nurse at Tulane’s Lakeview Regional Medical Center. Her job is to help mother’s find their maternal wings and instruct them on how to breastfeed, should they choose to do so.
Childbirth can be a difficult time for any mother, but those potential problems and anxieties have been compounded especially over the past few weeks because of the coronavirus pandemic. “Of course we want babies to breastfeed, but if the mother is COVID-19 positive we don’t want the baby to get the illness. Recently, we had a positive mother come in and she was very sick in the ICU. She delivered and automatically the baby was taken away from her. We needed to test the baby for the virus. It was sad because that mom didn’t get the chance to hold her baby. I was the one holding her baby,” says Kristen Johnson.
No matter what the course of her days in the hospital by bring, Kristen’s talent allows her a beautiful way to dance through the blues. She is a professional dancer and has her own dance company in Covington Louisiana called Projects and you can learn more about it through her instagram by clicking here. “That’s how I grew up, in a performing group. I’ve been a lot of places but when I was in Hawaii I didn’t do the hula! I did African dance with drums.”
She has danced in numerous theaters and has done choreography for various high schools and churches. She has also done choreography with Unite, a company that teachers cancer patients how to be models. Freedom is the dance and in a contemporary world of restriction and uncertainty, freedom is priceless.
Kristen currently teaches digital dance classes and continues to help deliver babies at the hospital. Make sure you tune in to WGNO every day this week to help us celebrate National Nurse Week!