She’s both ‘mom’ and boss. For these 3 AHN nurses, Hope lights the way.
When the Waltenbaugh family gathers this Mother’s Day, the focus will be on “mothers,” plural, as their matriarch, Hope, marks her first year as a grandmother, and her daughter, Madison, celebrates for the first time ever.
But after everyone hugs, snaps photographs and exchanges gifts, at some point, most of the family will walk away in disgust.
The divide isn’t due to political points of view or shouts that someone’s car is too expensive. The conflict comes when Hope, her son, Tyler, and her son-in-law, Chris, begin talking about what has become the family business: nursing.
“When we’re watching a movie or eating dinner, frequently, it’s me, my mom and Chris, talking about something cool we saw in the OR or during clinical,” Tyler said. “You definitely see the rest of the family walking away. It happens quite a lot.”
“Clinical” refers to the hands-on learning experienced by nursing students on real hospital units or in community clinics, which highlights just another reason this family is in party mode.
At home, Hope is wife, mom and grandma, but to the rest of the world, she’s Allegheny Health Network’s vice president of clinical nursing operations and innovation, where she oversees AHN’s nursing schools.
But on the evening of May 1, when one of those schools, AHN Citizen’s School of Nursing, held its graduation ceremony, Hope’s roles melded into one. She handed ceramic lamps to each member of the class, which included her own son, Tyler, all while Chris looked on, knowing he’ll do the same next year, as a member of Citizens’ graduating class of 2025.
The lamps symbolize each new nurse’s commitment to care for the sick and wounded, a nod to founder of modern nursing Florence Nightingale. But in the Waltenbaugh family, “the lady with the lamp” was, and is, known simply as mom.
False start
Hope began her medical career as a paramedic. She attempted nursing school, quit, but returned laterwhen her circumstances were arguably more difficult: married with two small children. But to her, that was positive pressure.
“I made a big sacrifice to go back to school 25 years ago. I stuck with it because I had a carrot,” she said. “It was my family, my kids, and I knew we needed the money I’d make when I was done.”
While many begin nursing school when they’re 18 or 19 years old, Hope needed more life experience, she said, to meet the academic, social and emotional aspects of nursing school and the profession itself.
As it turns out, the same is true for both Tyler and Chris, who set out to become nurses after high school, then quickly steered onto different paths: Tyler toward a degree in business and Chris toward union car-pentry.
As is the climax of many stories of this era, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.
Tyler was a student at Edinboro University, but he was also an employee at AHN’s St. Vincent Hospital in Erie.
He worked in “central sterile,” the department that cleans hospitals’ reusable instruments, coming mostly from operating rooms.
“I was never scared of COVID. I worked through it,” he said. “You hear the death numbers, the totals.
Now, whether the vaccine is really working. Having inside information, it blocks out all that white noise. You know what’s really going on inthe hospitals.”
After graduation, he achieved his goal of a job in medical sales, but since the pandemic had shut down hospitals to nonessential personnel, selling those deviceswas nearly impossible.
Similarly, Chris found himself unable to work as a carpenter since job sites had halted operation.
“COVID crushed our stability,” Tyler said. “But it also allowed us to come home, to pause, to reset our lives, and have a second chance at what we really wanted to do.”
Do as I say, and as I do
Hope attended Citizens School of Nursing, as her son and son-in-law later would. She was class president, just as Tyler would later be.
But when her school day ended, she came home to two small children and a husband, whose job as a machinist demanded about 50 hours per week.
While her own graduation relieved some of those pressures, Hope’s chosen challenges didn’t stop.
It was an era with more nurses and no “great exodus” further exacerbating a critical nursing shortage. New graduates didn’t often get their first choice of jobs. But Hope did.
At Allegheny Valley Hospital, now under the AHN umbrella, she became an operating room nurse, which comes with on-call hours and phones ringing in the middle of the night foremergency surgeries.
She chose to earn a bachelor’s of science in nursing, followed by a master’s degree in nursing, which set her on a leadership track.
While excelling at her career, she saw her time at home dwindle, and felt the strain that so many working parents do, having to pick and choose chances to be present for school events, playdates and impromptu weekend fun.
“You hear it all the time that the working mom is running in with the storebought cupcakes. You’re jealous of the stay-at-home momsbecause they come in looking perfect. I came with my hair on fire,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve had a lot of good mentors who were also moms. They told me that you can’t be at every single event, but know that you’re building this career. Your kids are watching that, and you’re doing somethingfor them.”
Lighting the lamp
Hope always wondered how her kids thought of her, both as a nurse and a mother.
With Tyler and Chris’ firsthand nursing school experience, she knows they now understand how challenging the field is.
“I tell people all the time, I did more work in six months of nursing school than I ever did in five years of college, hands down,” Tyler said.
When Hope and Tyler were interviewed together by the Post-Gazette, she learned his thoughts on her as a mother.
“I never felt like mom wasn’t there enough,” he said. “She took us to the hospital. We met her friends there. I understood why she didwhat she did because I’ve always been interested in themedical field.”
The answer brought tears to Hope’s eyes.
But unforgettable moments are the norm for the Waltenbaughs lately.
Decisions Hope makes as a high-ranking nurse administrator aren’t only informed by institutional knowledge or the more than 6,000 nurses who might be affected.
In her mind, those 6,000 are now represented by one, making each of them personal.
“Every time we’re talking through strategic plays for nursing, I think, ‘ My son is going to reap these rewards,’ ” she said. “It makes me sit up sometimes when we’re making decisions at the executive level. We talk about this broad nursing, but I think about this person who’s coming up through the ranks: my own son.”
The relationship between Hope and Tyler is well known throughout his nursing program and the floors on which he practiced his skills. He’s heard comments about his course being “easier” because of her, but he also knows he was handed absolutely nothing … except, maybe, an extraordinary experience in March.
During his final day of obstetrics clinical at Forbes Hospital, he saw several familiar faces — and a brand-new one, as his sister gave birth to her first child, with Hope and Chris by her side, his dad in the waiting room.
Hope credits the pandemic for bringing everyone closer together, physically — as they live within a three-mile radius of one another — and in their relationships, especially the unmistakable connection between the family’s three nurses.
But that outcome was only possible because of foundations laid, ironically, during years when Hope, like so many mothers, questioned her own effectiveness.
She may have been the mom with her “hair on fire,” but she’s also modeled something so worthy of imitation that when the world stopped, two of the people closest to her chose to get closer, and now one of them is poised to spread his own light into the world, using the lamp that she gave him.
“We put too much on ourselves as moms. We have to look perfect. We have to be perfect. The kids have to be perfect. It all turns out OK,” she said. “Now especially, there’s always going to be this mutual respect from me to [Tyler and Chris] and back and forth.
“I have love for the men that they are, but I also have respect for the jobs that they’re doing and what they’re doing for others. Thereare no words for it.”