On both sides of nurse careers: Mom-daughter duo share bond as caregivers this Mother’s Day

Before Lois Yearous started as a nurse in 2004, her daughter – then around age 10 – tried to help with studies of complex medical words.

It must have created a spark in Natasha Yearous, now 32, who became a nurse in 2016.

“It was probably instilled in me long before I became a nurse, because when I was a kid, I would try to read my mom’s notes to her with all the complicated words,” Natasha Yearous said. “In trying to pronounce all these big words, I thought I was helping so much. Now I know that when I went upstairs is when Mom actually studied.”

Her mom as a student also babysat a relative’s children, and the group would sometimes go in to see nursing classmates.

“When they had to do assessments on kids, we would go and be the kids they’d assess,” she said.

The mother-daughter duo have since worked on the same hospital floor, worn matching scrubs, gone to conferences together and shared a view to approach patients with a strong dose of empathy.

After more than 15 years as a bedside nurse, Lois Yearous moved into professional development roles at MultiCare to support other nurses, and her daughter works as a nurse in MultiCare’s Pulse Heart Institute. They continue to learn from each other. They’ll also share time this Mother’s Day with a barbecue that includes Lois Yearous’ husband, Doug, son Cameron, 29, and Lois Yearous’ mom from Oregon.

Lois Yearous, a nurse manager for a unit-based professional team in the Puget Sound region, remains in Spokane as part of another role – manager of the systemwide nurse tech team. Nurse techs are nursing students hired by MultiCare while still in school, after they’ve done at least one clinical rotation and checked off certain skills.

She has more than 100 nurse techs, including about 18 in this region. Today, as the industry faces a nurse shortage, Lois Yearous gains perspective from her daughter.

“I learn something from her all the time,” she said. “Now that I’m not right at the bedside, things come out all the time and new practices come out all the time. She’ll say something, and I’ll say, ‘Oh, did that practice change?’ Even though I work in the professional development realm, having the connection to the bedside through her is nice.”

That caregiver bond was strengthened after March 27, when Natasha Yearous had an eight-hour proctocolectomy surgery because of Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory condition of the gastrointestinal tract. Her mother took three weeks off to be her caregiver.

“Yeah, my mom was my nurse,” said Natasha Yearous, who is scheduled to return to work Monday after a six-week recovery. “Mom stayed at my house for three weeks because I still had lots of wounds and drains that needed to be taken care of after the hospital. It was so nice to have Mom there.”

She now has an ostomy bag.

“It was a big surgery, and my disease was so bad that the doctor wrote in her notes it looked like I had chemo done, but I didn’t,” she said. “That’s how damaged it was.”

That experience will roll into her patient care.

“You can take your own life experiences and take that to patients,” she said. “I’ve had that chronic pain for a while, and I always would tell patients, ‘I understand,’ and let them know it’s OK to be mad and be frustrated with your body, and go through this grieving process with diseases and surgeries.

“You try to relate to patients, take care of them and at the same time to let them know, ‘Yes, today, i (it’s difficult), but I’m going to help you through this.’ ”

Lois Yearous, who came to Spokane from Oregon, first worked at another regional hospital in cardiac telemetry, later doing a stint in a neuro-trauma ICU. She got her master’s in nursing education at Gonzaga University, and after a year of teaching, returned as an assistant nurse manager on the same cardiac unit she’d worked in before.

“I just missed being at the bedside,” she said. “I love doing nursing and being by patients, and I wasn’t really ready to step away from the bedside yet.”

She was hired by MultiCare for professional development work in January 2019. But before, she got to work alongside her daughter. After graduating from Carroll College, Natasha Yearous took her first job with the cardiac transplant unit on the same floor where her mom worked in cardiac telemetry.

“We would actually carpool my first job because we worked on the same floor but in two different units,” Natasha Yearous said. “I would talk to her about my patients, because you’re learning when you’re a new nurse. You’re working through everything and using your critical thinking skills. I did this, this and this with this patient, and then Mom says, ‘Did you bladder scan them?’ I’d be, ‘Dang it, I didn’t.’

“Each time, I would try to figure out, did I do everything? I think it was about six months into it when my mom said, ‘I can’t think of anything you’ve missed.’ ”

“Every day on the way home, I’d quiz her like a nursing instructor, because that’s what my master’s is in,” her mom said. “And every night when I was taking her home, I would find something else she could have done as a critical thinking exercise, and, yes, at about six months, I told her, ‘I think you did everything right.’ ”

Natasha Yearous said she likely learned her job faster with her mother’s mentorship.

“Because Mom was a nurse leader on the floor, sometimes I’d say, ‘I don’t know what is going on with this patient.’ She’d come in, we’d have to fix it or send the patient down to ICU. It’s the sixth floor at Sacred Heart, but they (the units) work together.”

During COVID-19, Natasha Yearous was furloughed because of her immunocompromised status, so she began a job with a congenital heart clinic for just over a year as an electrophysiology cardiac nurse. She got a tip about MultiCare’s Pulse center from her mother.

“I work at the cardiovascular admit and recovery unit,” she said. “It’s for a short stay where people come in for a procedure and typically get to go home the same day. There is a lot of education. They come in, we get IV in, educate them on the procedure, do any interventions that need to be done. They then recover with us.”

Today, the two women say they share the same patient care focus.

“When Tasha was explaining about how she meets people where they are, it’s almost word for word what I would have said when I worked the bedside,” Lois Yearous said. “You try to relate to patients as much as possible and make it as easy for them as you can. You take care of patients and you get to go home. But you try to remember this usually is the worst day in their life, so how do you meet them where they are? I think I’ve instilled that.”