CHS grad finds rewarding career at hospital where she was treated

One night in the summer of 2014 before she started seventh grade at the Galvin Middle School, Olivia Chambers walked outside to ask her older brother a question. He was adding citronella oil to a tabletop firepot and it unexpectedly burst into flames as Chambers drew near. Her brother pushed her away and smothered the flames with a pillow. Her parents immediately drove her to Norwood Hospital where the medical staff determined that she needed to be transferred to Shriners Children’s Boston.

Olivia Chambers

Chambers was 13 years old and suffered burns on her hands, chest, and face in the accident. The treatment she received at Shriners led in part to her decision to become a nurse. Chambers now works at Shriners and is mentored by one of the same nurses who cared for her when she was a patient.

“I think it was more shock than anything,” Chambers said of being burned. “I was trying to convince my mom that I was okay, because I wanted to be okay.”

Once the family arrived at Norwood Hospital, decisions about the care that Chambers needed were made quickly, and within an hour she had received medication and was in an ambulance headed for Shriners. She stayed at the hospital for less than a week, during which time she underwent debridement, which is the removal of damaged skin.

Chambers said that when a person is burned, dead skin sits on top of the wound bed. That dead skin must be removed prior to treatment. “When a patient comes in, before you can wrap the wound or give them a dressing, you have to debride the wound,” she explained.

The medical staff can use a physical debridement with gauze or a chemical debridement process, which involves applying ointments to the wound.

Certain patients are taken to the operating room and given anesthesia before a lotion is applied. The lotion is taken off the skin 24 hours later and then the staff removes the dead skin. Chambers said that a new medication called NexoBrid, a pineapple derivative, is also being used. It is applied to the skin and stays on for four hours while it breaks down dead skin tissue.

“In general, it’s not a pleasant process,” she said of undergoing debridement. Chambers underwent a physical debridement process, which she said was very painful. Once she returned home, a nurse visited her to check on her progress.

Chambers returned to the Galvin Middle School that fall. “I healed very nicely,” she said, “but when your skin grows back, it’s a different color. I had baby skin, so the skin on my face was very patchy.”

She had grown her hair quite long, but a lot of it was also burned, so she had it cut to chin length. “To me, it felt like everyone could notice, but I don’t know if that was the case,” she said of her classmates’ reaction to seeing her again.

Most of her skin healed within three weeks, but she did have some areas that had more scarring than others, which took longer to heal. As a student at Canton High School, she had laser surgery on scarred areas. She also had pig skin grafts on her fingers. The skin on those fingers grew back underneath the grafts, allowing the pig skin to fall off.

“I was definitely very fortunate,” Chambers said of how she healed.

While she was a patient at Shriners, the nurses got her out of bed to walk around. On one of her walks, she met some young boys who were patients. “I had always loved kids,” she said. “(The boys) were very cute.” She became friends with one of them due to what they were going through.

“I knew I wanted to work with kids,” she said, “and that definitely helped solidify that.”

Her first memories of wanting to be a nurse happened at about the same time. She also knew she wanted to give back to the hospital. Within a few years of the accident, she volunteered with children at Shriners.

“I remember we went and made slime,” she said, “because slime was the craze back then. That was fun.”

She later did a fundraiser for her birthday, raising $500 for the hospital. Other members of her family have followed her lead, with her grandfather, father, and brother donating money to Shriners.

Chambers graduated from CHS in 2020 and then earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing in 2024 from Merrimack College. The college has a special meaning for her, since her grandparents attended Merrimack and met each other there.

After graduation, she applied to hospitals for a job, but noted that the market for new nurses can be tough. She was offered a position at a hospital, but was “really hoping to be able to start at Shriners and was very excited when [she] got my offer.”

At Shriners, Chambers works with Kara Sher, an inpatient nurse manager who took care of Chambers when she was a patient 10 years ago. Sher is less involved with patient care in her role, but Chambers said she’s the first one to step up if the unit is short-staffed.

She is happy to be at Shriners. “It’s going well,” she said. “I just got off orientation, so that’s been very exciting. It’s very busy. I have to ask for help sometimes, but that’s okay. I feel like I’m definitely getting the hang of it. Every day I go in and I have something new to learn.”

Chambers has had the unique opportunity to view Shriners as both a patient and a nurse.

“I see kids every single day that have gone through unimaginable things,” she said. “Having both sides of that is very beneficial. I can instill a lot of hope, but I also put my own accident into perspective. I try not to invalidate those feelings, because at the end of the day, it was definitely a traumatic experience for me, but I did get very lucky and the extent of my injuries was definitely not what it could have been.”

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Posted by Mary Ann Price on Dec 27 2024. Filed under Features. Both comments and pings are currently closed.