Sometimes, Healing Comes With Comfort Food
Mikael Espanol, HHC Midstate Medical Center
There’s medicine and technology to care for patients, but Mikael Espanol understands that sometimes it just comes down to comfort food.
Espanol, a registered nurse at Midstate Medical Center on a medical telemetry unit, had a patient recovering from a complex spine surgery that was complicated by a postoperative stroke. She had a poor appetite, and was not eating. The patient told her doctor that food tasted like cardboard, and she craved lumpia, a traditional Filipino dish similar to an egg roll.
Her surgeon, Dr. Shirvinda A. Wijesekera, mentioned the situation to Espanol, who was her nurse on this night. “I was hoping he could coax a bit of Ensure into her.”
Rounding the next night, Dr. Wijesekera found his patient in her room feasting on lumpia. Espanol had gone home after his shift, told his wife the story, and she had cooked up a big batch of both lumpia and other Filipino dishes to temt the patient’s palate. Espanol wasn’t assigned to this patient on this night, but he brought her the food anyway.
“Let me express my profound gratitude to Mikael Espanol and his wife,” Wijesekera said. “I am so very proud of his caring and dedication to a patient that wasn’t even his charge this night. Mikael has earned my respect and admiration. He deserves accolades to reward his true spirit as a healthcare hero. His quiet efforts make a difference.”
Espanol’s efforts are noticed by his colleagues at Midstate. This year he was named one of the hospital’s Nightingales. The annual Nightingale Awards for Excellence in Nursing program celebrates outstanding nurses and elevates the nursing profession. He will be recognized along with nurses from across Hartford
Healthcare on May 12.
Espanol, whose parents emigrated here from the Philippines in the 1990s, is in his fifth year of nursing. Now 26, he worked in nursing homes prior to coming to Midstate. He earned his Bachelor’s of Nursing degree from the Lorma Colleges School of Nursing in the Philippines. He and his wife of four years live in Middletown.
Both his parents are nurses, so the dinner table at their Meriden home was full of medical talk and stories. “When I was a kid they would bring me with them to the nursing home where they worked,” he recalled. “I saw the interaction between my parents and their patients, how my parents would make them feel comfortable, would make them happy.”
Espanol’s younger sister is a newly minted graduate of nursing school, and his wife is also a nurse. They met at Lorma College.
The story of the patient who wanted the lumpia speaks to the core of Espanol’s nursing philosophy, and harkens back to his childhood memories of watching his parents care for their patients.
“She was coming from the orthopedic unit, and I was reading up on her, and I saw on her chart she wasn’t eating. Then her surgeon mentioned the lumpia to me, and I know it can be really hard to find. But my wife knows how to make it. So she got all the ingredients and made them and brought them to the hospital the next night. That patient had a buffet! Even though she wasn’t my patient, I really wanted to see it through.
“For me, if there is something that I can do for a patient that makes their stay better, I will do it,” he continued. “It’s hard being in the hospital. So I make it the best for them that it can be.”