National Nurses Week
National Nurses Week may be just one week on the calendar, but for those of us who have worked in a hospital, loved a healthcare professional, loved a patient, or even been a patient, we know the appreciation doesn’t end there.
Nurses touch lives in profound ways every day. Most of the stories will never be published or shared beyond the hospital room, but they certainly deserve to be.
So we wanted to take this week to ask the nurses on the VRpatients simulation team – Paul Mazurek, Martha Levine, and Joy Jacobs – to share a patient story that truly shaped their lives forever. The moment they knew they had chosen the right profession. The moment they knew they made a difference.
Here are their stories.
The Last Dance: Paul’s Story
Paul Mazurek always considered himself a “paramedic with a nursing license.” He is orderly, disciplined and resourceful. As a flight nurse, he has seen the worst traumas imaginable, and is given more authority than most to take almost any action he needs to save a life until the patient can get to the hospital. But, one patient changed him forever.
Before becoming a flight nurse, Paul worked in the cardiothoracic pediatric ICU at University of Michigan Health in Ann Arbor. Most of his patients were babies, which were preferred among the nursing staff. One day, an older teenager arrived. He had been battling a lifelong heart condition and was presenting with protein-losing enteropathy, a condition in which there is an increased loss of proteins through the gastrointestinal tract, which leads to low serum proteins and chronic diarrhea.
“I still remember his name – Jared,” said Paul. “His condition didn’t allow him to do a lot of the things that normal kids could do.” The nursing staff asked Paul if he would take Jared’s case so they could care for the patients they were most comfortable with, the babies. Paul agreed.
Over the course of many weeks, Jared was in and out of the ICU, so Paul and Jared had time to get to know each other pretty well. Jared was an avid Ohio State fan, so being treated at the University of Michigan Health’s hospital gave Paul plenty of opportunities to razz him– including replacing his scarlet and gray room décor overnight with maize and blue spirit wear from the hospital’s gift shop!
“I bonded with this kid. He was different, and I was really able to put myself in his shoes,” Paul said. This included buying him a Christmas tree for his room the year he had to spend Christmas in the hospital.
Prom season rolled around several months later. Sadly, Jared was admitted to the hospital a few days before the big day and put on a ventilator. Jared’s parents had asked Paul if he could help him “still go to the prom” by dressing him in his tux and bringing his girlfriend to his hospital room. Paul pulled some strings. He worked with his parents to get every component of his tuxedo on so he would be ready. This meant carefully maneuvering the shirt, pants, cumber bun, suspenders and bow tie around the ventilator.
Then, it was time.
Jared’s parents brought his girlfriend up to his room. She was dressed to the nines in her prom dress, boutonnière for Jared clutched tightly in both hands. Upon seeing Jared, she dove into his bed and hugged him. They cried together.
Less than a week later, Jared passed.
“I stayed with his parents as he died,” recalled Paul. “And that was the first time I actually learned what it meant to be a nurse.”
Paul Mazurek is the Educational Nurse Coordinator of the University of Michigan Survival Flight and the Nursing Product Manager/SME Team Lead for VRpatients.
Full Circle: Martha’s Story
He was their first child — perfect in every way. Full-term, with ten fingers, ten toes, and a button nose. But when his parents came in for a routine checkup, there was no heartbeat.
As a labor and delivery nurse, I learned to expect the unexpected. But there’s no preparing for the moment when you help a couple bring their stillborn child into the world — not because of anything wrong with his body, but because of a tight knot in his umbilical cord. Their baby had been active, joyful even, spinning in circles in the safety of the womb. But that playful energy created a knot. And as he grew, the knot tightened. Eventually, it cut off his lifeline.
We often say stillborn babies are born sleeping. This beautiful boy came silently into the world, and I was there — helping his parents navigate not just labor, but grief too deep for words. I attended his funeral. I watched two people walk through an unimaginable loss.
Years passed.
One day, as I started my shift, I was told that a couple had arrived in labor and delivery — and they had asked for me by name. It was them.
They were expecting again. A rainbow baby. And despite everything we had been through together, they wanted me by their side. I was stunned. Honored. And honestly, a little unsure. How could they want me — the nurse who was there for the worst day of their lives?
They told me I had walked with them through their heartbreak, and they couldn’t imagine this next chapter without me. That level of trust and vulnerability moved me beyond words.
It was a tense labor — every moment laden with anxiety, with memory. But then, she arrived. Their daughter. Pink, crying, alive. And I wept.
That birth changed me. Not because of the medical complexities, but because of what it meant — to be asked to show up for someone not just in their grief, but in their joy. To be trusted in both the darkest and brightest moments of their lives.
I still think of that family often. Of their quiet strength. Their willingness to feel everything — the devastation and the delight. They taught me that nursing is not just clinical. It’s sacred. It’s about being fully present in the rawest corners of human experience, and about honoring the fullness of people’s stories, no matter how painful or beautiful.
Martha Levine is the Director of Nursing Innovation and Curriculum Integration at VRpatients.
Heart of a Lion: Joy’s Story
“Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” – Galatians 6:2
When Joy Jacobs walked across her high‑school graduation stage in 1993, she believed she was headed to a courtroom, not an ICU. But life—and a miracle—rewrote the script. That fall her pregnant sister developed HELLP syndrome, a then‑poorly understood obstetric crisis with alarming mortality rates. Joy was inspired by the teams of nurses and physicians as they sprang into coordinated action: an emergency C‑section, ventilator support, weeks of vigilant ICU care. Mother and premature son survived. Joy’s journey to a legal career didn’t.
Joy’s Sister & Nephew
Miracle Christmas ‘93
“I realized the advocate I wanted to become wore scrubs, not a suit,” Joy recalls. She soon enrolled in a vocational nursing program, immediately advanced with her RN, earned her BSN, all while working as one of the coveted new‑grad slots in the emergency department. Chaos felt like a calling. Flu seasons, trauma alerts, helicopter touchdowns—Joy greeted every patient as if she were meeting patients, just like her sister, at the worst moment of their lives.
One February night—coincidentally enough, her sister’s birthday—the ED was drowning in critical arrivals when a triage note labeled a 35‑year‑old woman as low acuity “flu symptoms.” Something in the patient’s pale ears and guarded breaths made Joy pause. A quick conversation turned into a thorough assessment and an immediate cardiac work‑up that the patient insisted she didn’t need. The first labs whispered normal. The second murmured maybe.The third shouted the truth: myocardial infarction.
By Joy’s next shift the following night, the “flu patient” lay intubated in the ICU—but alive. Joy was grateful that she refused to let her intuition be silenced. Almost two years passed when that same woman, now a heart‑transplant recipient, waited until Joy’s shift started. She hugged Joy and said, “You fought with and for me- you have the heart of a lion.” By the way, her first name? The very same as Joy’s sister’s!
The echoes of that moment kept coming. Years later, over a coffee break she ran into the obstetrician who saved her sister. Joy learned he had attended a conference and started practicing simulation drills on HELLP right before that harrowing night. Not long after, another “coincidence” sealed her direction: one of the world’s largest healthcare‑simulation companies—purchased a small plastics company in Joy’s now hometown to manufacture healthcare training manikins. Joy saw Providence tapping her on the shoulder.
Joy leapt from bedside leadership to medical simulation—first at that facility, then with two additional simulation giants, and now at the cutting edge of immersive, AI‑powered VR with VRpatients.
Today, Joy measures her impact in quiet, multiplied moments: every time a learner pauses a scenario to rethink a dosage, every time a new grad recognizes subtle vital‑sign changes, every time a rural hospital trains for a crisis it may face only once. She may no longer push the stretcher down the hall, but through simulation she is still at the bedside—guarding each heartbeat, sharpening each mind, and shaping safer care long before the patient arrives.
Joy Jacobs is an R.N., B.S.N. and the Director of Business Development for VRpatients.
VRpatients is grateful to have Paul, Martha, and Joy among our staff of amazing, dedicated healthcare clinicians, developers, and advocates. While National Nurses Week is every day for us, this week is a special week to thank a nurse who has impacted your life. Thanks to all the world’s caregivers for all they do to help those who need it most.