Children with cancer and blood disorders move to a new unit at Wolfson Children's Hospital
A few minutes past 10 a.m. Wednesday, Marissa Ierna arrived at the entrance to a place where she?ll spend a lot of time over the next six months.
Somebody handed her some scissors and she cut a ribbon, officially opening the new 24-bed Hematology/Oncology Unit in the J. Wayne and Delores Barr Weaver Tower at Baptist Medical Center.
Ierna, 18, has been undergoing treatment at Wolfson Children?s Hospital for a soft-tissue sarcoma in her calf since last spring. She will continue receiving treatment until early next June.
She was picked by Wolfson staff to be the first patient to move from the old Hematology/Oncology Unit on the fifth floor of the old Wolfson Children?s Hospital onto the fourth floor of the new tower.
After cutting the ribbon, Ierna walked with Becki Morgan, who has been an oncology nurse at Wolfson for 10 years, to her new room, where a large window commanded a view of the Fuller Warren Bridge.
?I love it,? Ierna said. ?The windows are my favorite part.?
?This is an amazing, amazing day,? Morgan said. ?It an exciting new journey for us. The rooms are awesome.?
It?s been a big week for Ierna, who graduated from Atlantic Beach High School in June, shortly after her tumor was diagnosed.
Sunday she attended the game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Jets as a guest of coach Mike Mularkey. She met Mularkey, owner Shad Khan, running back Maurice Jones-Drew and wide receiver Justin Blackmon. She tweeted Jets backup quarterback Tim Tebow, hoping to meet him. But he didn?t respond.
While Morgan led Ierna on a tour of the new unit, which includes a Tebow room, other nurses began bringing the other 22 patients with cancer, sickle cell disease and other blood disorders from Wolfson 5 to the new unit.
Like Wolfson 5, the new unit has 24 patient rooms. But four of the rooms on Wolfson 5 were reserved for bone marrow transplant patients. Since those patients had to be kept in a sterile environment because of the risk from airborne germs, the rooms were in some ways like prison cells, said Wolfson president Michael Aubin. They didn?t have bathrooms and the patients couldn?t leave them.
But the air is being filtered by HEPA filters throughout the new unit and the powerful filters remove 99.97 percent of impurities, Aubin said. Now every room on the floor can house bone marrow transplant patients and they are no longer confined to their rooms.
?This is a happy moment for our patients and families,? Aubin said. ?Of course there is still sadness here because these children have cancer. But there?s hope as well.?
Aubin said when he began his career, there was about 50 percent chance that hospitalized children would survive their cancer. Today there?s an 80-85 percent survival rate.
Linda Rosengrend, chaplain of the unit for the last six years, said she has been walking around Wolfson 5 the last few days ?thinking of all the things that happened there.?
?Now we?ll be creating new memories,? Rosengrend said. ?But we won?t forget the old ones.?
Charlie Patton: (904) 359-4413
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