Health Services: Registered Nurse
Health Services
Teresa Chow: Registered Nurse
By Alice Keesing • Photos by Scott T. Kubo
For Teresa Chow, every workday is a reminder of the miracle and joy of life. As a postpartum nurse at Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center, she takes care of the women who have recently delivered, helping them and their families as they welcome a new baby into their lives.
When Teresa graduated from Campbell High School, she had her sights set on becoming a pediatrician. While taking pre-med classes at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, she went through the federal work-study program and got a job at Kapi‘olani Medical Center for Women & Children. It was a clerical job, but Teresa says the experience was invaluable.
“I absorbed everything that went on around me, how the doctors worked, how the system worked,” she says. “Of course, it’s minimum pay, but it was enough to pay for my school and I got the experience.”
And it was that experience that led Teresa to change her path to nursing.
“The doctors, they come, they say hi, they say bye, they do their thing and then they’re gone,” she says. “But nurses, they’re the ones with you, the ones who get to know you. And I wanted to do something that had more contact with the patients.”
Teresa transferred to Kapi‘olani Community College and enrolled in the two-year associate degree nursing program.
It was like boot camp, she says, and there were days when she would come home crying because she was so exhausted. The clinical work taught her about the challenges of the job. She learned how hard it could be to work with cancer patients; how nerve wracking it is to care for someone who has tubes draining their chest.
These days Teresa is thankful she stuck it through those hard times and persevered with her dream. She graduated in 2001 and went to work in the postpartum ward at Moanalua. It’s her job to work with new mothers and their babies after the birth. She helps the mothers on the road to recovery and the family as it adjusts to the arrival of a new member, whether it’s learning how to breast-feed or change a diaper.
“I love this part of the life cycle,” she says. “I love the miracle of birth, and I love helping the moms bond with their babies.”
Teresa finds the close contact with her patients one of the most rewarding parts of her job; she often receives thank you notes and birth announcements and even first-birthday invitations.
On the flip side, it can be difficult when a baby is born to a mother who perhaps is not ready for a child and then you have to avoid being judgmental, she says. And there are those times—thankfully rare—when a baby dies during delivery. A handful of times in her eight-year career Teresa has had to bring a baby’s body from the morgue so the parents could say goodbye.
“You’re there to help these grieving parents and you’re trying to hold your own emotions in,” Teresa says. “That is the hardest part of the job.” This is not a job to do just for the pay, she cautions. “You have to be nurturing and loving and understanding and patient, because you’re there for the patient.”