Nurses are the backbone of our health care system. From lending an empathetic ear to administering medications to sitting with us when it feels like the world is falling down around us, they are there—making us feel human while seeming superhuman themselves. The nurses within these pages are the ones you nominated for their lasting influence, and they are truly the champions of our West Virginia centers of care. Read their stories, discover what inspires them, and be inspired yourself.

Audrey Skeen

RN, ASN, Cardiopulmonary ICU CAMC Memorial Hospital Specialty: Cardiac nursing

When Audrey Skeen was growing up, she didn’t know how she wanted her career to unfold. She just knew she wanted to take care of people or animals. As she wrapped up high school, science was a big passion of hers. She also had a beloved grandmother who was a nurse for 35 years, so she settled on the role for herself as well. “I definitely got a lot of that side of nursing, the compassionate side, just from seeing her in a grandmother role and how she would talk about her patients when she would come home,” Skeen says.

Compassion must run in the family. Skeen has seen the unimaginable as patients on the brink of death are wheeled through the doors of her department. Her personal touch has allowed her not only to assist the team with treatments and analysis, but also to connect with the people who have needed it most. She’s just as quick to braid a patient’s hair as she is to monitor their blood pressure, and those little things matter more than most people realize, she says. “I love that little back part of nursing—the actual patient care,” she says.

That additional time and attention spent on patients doesn’t just make their days a little brighter. It’s also helped Skeen notice things that might have fallen to the wayside in a department as hectic as the ICU. She recalls one memory that looms large: As she tended to an 18-year-old in the ICU after a severe car accident, she noticed that the patient was extremely unwilling to open her mouth. Skeen sat with her time and time again to try and figure out what was wrong, and eventually realized that the patient’s teeth were loose, causing so much discomfort and pain that she had been unable to communicate. It’s this keen and compassionate eye that makes Skeen an outstanding caregiver.

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