Her baby son nearly died on Christmas Eve. Three years later, she was a pediatric nurse.
This story is part of our They Care series, highlighting locals who contribute to the health and well-being of others.
Sixteen Christmas Eves ago, Liz Mancing felt the weight of perfection, as many parents do on that night, and performed one last mental check of all the holiday to-dos.
She’d wrapped all of the presents for her two kids and planned the dinners and visits. But there was one oversight: She forgot Christmas cardsfor her immediate family.
Enduring the growing pains of an immature immune system, her 13-month-old son, Kyle, was a little sniffly with an unconcerning fever. A dose of Tylenol later, he was ready for a last-minute Target trip on one of the most notoriously windy, unpleasant holiday nights in memory.
Tucked into his cozy shopping cart seat cover, his attention darted around the busy store while he played. But as Mancing pushed her baby son around the corner, rolling from school supplies to the card section, everything stopped, because Kyle did.
He was lifeless, slumped to one side and blue.
Mancing screamed for help. No fewer than six good Samaritans answered her call. One of them was a physician.
He directed one onlooker to grab scissors from the school supply aisle — should he need to cut Kyle’s shirt for CPR, Mancing understood later — and told another to call 911.
There, in a Target aisle, Kyle did require CPR, a round or two, until he regained a pulse.
An ambulance ride took him to the closest hospital, UPMC Cranberry, where he was stabilized. Then, a wind-grounded STAT MedEvac team accompanied him in an ambulance to UPMC Children’s Hospital.
Mancing’s memory, smudged by the effects of adrenaline, isn’t sure of all the details, but as Maya Angelou predicted, Mancing remembers how she felt.
Punctuating the searing anxiety over her tiny son’s well-being, she felt awe for the medical professionals caring for him. Specifically, she remembers the flight nurse who, during the ambulance ride, eased her darkest fears while somehow making her laugh. Then, there was the pediatric ICU nurse, Lisa, who talked Mancing through the tortuous decision to go home for a while — to get rest, a shower and time with her older son, Wes — leaving Kyle’s care solely in the PICU professionals’ capable hands, just for a little bit.
Those feelings are not only indelible: They changed the trajectory of her life.
“That was pretty much the time
when I said, ‘I don’t want to work at my [finance] job anymore. I want to be home with the kids. I want to help people with more than their money. I have a different purpose,’ ” she recalled. “I immediately knew I had to be a nurse.”
Kyle endured endless testing to learn the cause of his Christmas Eve crisis. After a week at Children’s, his medical caretakers concluded that he experienced febrile (fever-caused) seizures as the result of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and croup.
By March 2009, Mancing had already scheduled a physical to gain admittance to nursing school as a second-degree student, an expedited route toward earning a bachelor of science in nursing degree (BSN) for those who already hold a bachelor’s degree.
With her sights set on a fall 2009 start date, she encountered two bumps in the road.
Because she already earned a degree in exercise science and nutrition, her transcripts included many of the prerequisite courses necessary for most second-degree programs. But she’d taken them more than 10 years before, rendering them useless according to the admission requirements of the programsshe considered.
The second bump was more of a physical undulation: She was unexpectedly pregnant with her third child.
Neither derailed her. When her pregnancy turned complicated, requiring blood transfusions at hospital infusion clinics, she used the time to study for courses — anatomy, biology, chemistry and more — she was taking for a second time.
And while she waited for her scheduled C-section later that year, she sat hunched over a baby bump and a textbook, finishing homework just before her daughter, Lucy, arrived.
Delayed by a year, nursing school began — and her balancing act continued — in fall 2010, when Mancing was 33, at Robert Morris University.
“I didn’t really study around the little kids because when I was home, I wanted to be mom,” she said. “I’d stay up late studying, and I’d get up at 5 or 6 a.m., and go to the Eat’n Park in Sewickley to study.”
With her colorful obstetrics history, she thought that brand of nursing might suit her well, but was mistaken, she learned. The ICU had too much tubing. Psychiatric nursing wasn’t right either. She was temporarily confused about her path, until her next rotation: pediatrics.
Kyle’s care took place at Children’s Oakland campus, but Mancing’s clinical rotation was at the (then) brand new Lawrenceville campus — all of the awe with none of the traumatic memories.
“I just remember thinking how awesome it all was,” she said. “I loved it. I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with pediatrics.”
She graduated with a BSN in December 2011, passed her board exam and, by the first week in February, was working at Children’s hospital on an adolescent medicine floor, where she stayed for 10 years.
After a short stint in another role, she chose hospice nursing in February 2020 — a difficult specialty she welcomed, though that excitement was challenged when, just one month later, COVID-19 shut down the U.S.
“Needless to say, it was hell. It was also the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “We all saw on the news that no one could go see these people in nursing homes, but I could. I was their person. Or I would have an iPad so they could see their families that way.
“It would wear on me. I would cry in my car. It was so hard, but I felt like I had to take care of them, because who else was going to?”
In the years since Kyle’s episode in Target, she’s learned how and why the flight nurse and Lisa, the PICU nurse, were able to handle her so gently and firmly at once.
She, too, learned, and earned, that skill in her 12 years as a nurse. But now, as a case manager for an insurance company, her patient interactions are over the phone, where her experience and science-backed persuasions might be the difference between a patient appropriately calling 911 (or not) or continuing to take medications whose value may not yet be clear.
While she misses working with patients in person, she’s more available to her very first one: Kyle, who is now a sophomore at Seneca Valley High School.
Kyle plays football and runs track, and he’s also set a course to work in health sciences, just like those who saved his life.
“I’m interested in the body. I like health and how it works: What’s good for you versus what’s not,” he said. “Since my mom is a nurse and knows a lot about that stuff, she helps me out.”
It’s what any mother would do but, in this case, it’s a bartering system.
“Now that we’re older together, he helps me, too,” Mancing said. “We’ll go to the gym together, and he’ll tell me I need more protein or need to be doing strength training or whatever.”
Kyle doesn’t think much about the Christmas Eve that could have turned out very differently for him. To this day, neither he nor his mom knows who that Target-shopping superhero physician was, despite efforts to find out.
But making those thoughts conscious would be an idle exercise for Kyle: They’re ingrained in his very existence.
“It’s because of me, I think,” he answered when asked why his mom is a nurse.
It’s also because of him (and Wes and Lucy) that she lived on handfuls of hours of sleep as she dedicated herself to both “mom” and “nursing student” entirely, a trial of love and purpose he began to understand as his interest in an athletic training or a nutrition-associated career led him to honors courses in biology and chemistry.
“That must have been rough, being in school while we were so young, but I’m thankful she did it for us and for her, because I think she really enjoys her job now, and she’s happy with where she is,” he said. “And I’m really proud of her.”