The One Minute that Changed Her Life
Paula grew up shying away from the spotlight, with little desire to venture too far from home. But a radio ad she heard on the way to school one day gave her a one-minute look into Mercy Ships and opened her mind to adventures that she never dreamed of.
Paula Pheasant volunteers as the PACU (post-anesthesia care unit) team lead on board the Global Mercy. Caring for patients as they come out of their surgery, Paula is able to witness their first reactions as they wake up to a new life. After serving for almost 10 years, Paula shares, “I can’t imagine my life without having been here.”
In this episode, Paula shares about the important work she does on board caring for patients post anesthesia, the joy one patient gave her during a time of personal loss, and how God has taken her from the background into a position of leadership.
Looking for a way to join our mission of bringing hope and healing? Partner with us through a gift, volunteering with us, or by joining us in prayer.
New Mercies Podcast Transcript
Welcome to the New Mercies, a podcast by Mercy Ships, where we’ll take you behind the scenes and on board our incredible hospital ships that are transforming lives all over the world. We invite you to join us each week as we sit down with our crew, patients, volunteers, and partners to hear their stories of life-changing hope and healing.
One minute, that’s all it took for Paula Pheasant to have the course of her life changed. This beautiful nurse heard about Mercy Ships in a one-minute radio ad and it opened up her world to new possibilities. Get ready to be inspired, here’s my interview with Paula Pheasant.
Raeanne Newquist:
Paula, welcome to New Mercies.
Paula Pheasant:
Thank you.
Raeanne:
Paula, I know that you’re coming to us from the Global Mercy in Sierra Leone. And this happens to be a day off for you. So I consider it an honor and a privilege that you would take the time to come and chat with me instead of doing something super amazing and fun. So thank you for taking the time. What are you doing on board? What is your role?
Paula:
My official job title is PACU nurse team leader. And I’ve learned that a lot of people don’t know what PACU actually means. So it stands for Post Anesthesia Care Unit. Basically, that means we are at the recovery room or the wakeup room as we like to describe to kids, the place where people come immediately after surgery to wake up from their anesthesia. So I oversee the team of PACU nurses that come short term to serve.
Raeanne:
That must be an interesting position to be in. What is that like when they come to?
Paula:
It’s often not as dramatic as people expect. I also oversee a room that we call the holding bay, which is the room patients come to before they go to surgery. In that space, we educate them of what they can expect afterwards. And one of the things we tell them is it’s normal to feel confused when you’re waking up and also forgetful. And that’s just because of the anesthesia medicines. So sometimes it looks like telling a patient five or 10 or 15 times — your surgery is finished, you’re just waking up. It’s usually not very dramatic, but it’s actually a really important place for patients to safely recover from their surgery, which I have learned is not always something that happens in African settings as they don’t necessarily have PACU trained nurses. So it’s actually a really key spot. And I love it because I enjoy interacting with patients. They are asleep or sedated when they come into our room. But before we send them back to the ward, they’re fully awake, and we can actually have conversations with them. So I think it’s a hidden gem on the ship because we are the first people to see the patients wake up to a new life.
Raeanne:
Wow. That’s incredible. I can imagine what a privilege and an honor that is, but also such an important role because you get to be the first face that they see. And to be able to say, you’re okay, and you made it! because I think a lot of these patients come onto the ship, let alone into surgery, very fearful. This is so foreign and unknown. And they’ve had a burden for so long. And I’m sure there’s this tension of, I’m so excited that it’s going to be removed, but at the same time, I’m terrified because I don’t know what the result is going to be. Am I going to make it? So having a friendly face, they’re having a kind, compassionate nurse, when you come out of anesthesia to say you made it and everything’s going to be okay, must be absolutely incredible for them.
Paula:
Yeah, it feels very routine to us from Western countries. It’s normal for people to have surgery where we come from and you wouldn’t expect anything bad to happen through that surgery. But in places that we serve, populations often don’t have access to safe, affordable and timely surgery. And if you take away any one of those elements, then it’s actually not a good outcome for the patient. So in a local hospital, it might be a safe surgery, but maybe it’s not affordable to the patient. So then if they can pay for it, maybe now they can’t feed their children at home. It’s a really special thing to be able to care for patients. And then often they will say to us, after they’ve woken up, thank you so much or I never thought this would happen. I didn’t have money to pay for this.
Probably one of my favorites is whenever we have children and their parents come to see them after they’ve woken up because to a child, they don’t really know the impact of what has happened to them. But to a parent, for example, if it’s an orthopedic patient and their child has bowed legs, and has difficulty walking, or they’re made fun of when they go to school, when their parent comes in, and sees them with straight legs for the first time, they can see also into the future for their child of not just, you know, we have fixed their legs, but oh, now they can go to school, now they can grow up and they can get a job, they can get married and have a family. That’s one of the things that I find really powerful to be in PACU is that we are the first ones who get to witness when a child is awake to see their parents actually see what their child is like and what their life is going to look like in the future, not just in this immediate time of waking up from surgery.
Raeanne:
Wow, the impact goes far beyond just the patient. But it really does go into their family and their community.
Paula:
Yeah, I feel very honored that I get to see that because most people don’t. And the recovery room is not an area where the communications team come to film or do photos there because it is a very vulnerable time for patients as they’re waking up and being confused and everything. I feel very privileged that I get to witness that happening. And it’s not just you know, once a year or something, it’s very regularly, we get to see people who wake up to really a new life.
Raeanne:
Oh, my goodness, can you share with us maybe a specific example of that?
Paula:
Yeah. So there’s one patient that I remember from the field service in Senegal. And it was a boy who was a teenager, maybe 13, or 14. And he had a tumor growing that had been growing for quite some time. And his father had traveled a great distance and spent a lot of money trying to find help for him. And, you know, they had traveled throughout Senegal, and I believe they’ve gone to another country as well. And they just kept being told, I’m sorry, we can’t help you. There wasn’t anybody qualified to perform the type of surgery that he needed. And he came to the ship, and he had surgery. And it actually it was supposed to be quite a complex surgery, and then ended up not being as involved as they expected. So the surgery was shorter than they had planned, which was a good thing. And when his dad came into PACU, you know, he was just so filled with joy, that he finally had been able to, after years of trying to get help for his son, that he actually had had surgery. And I don’t speak any languages other than English. But in each country, I tried to learn how to say thank you in a few of the local languages from what our translators speak. So I knew thank you in a few different languages. And as we were getting ready to take the boy back to the ward, his Papa said to us, thank you in, I think at least five different languages, including, including English. So it was just, it was a really special moment of I realized he doesn’t know how to convey to us how grateful he is. But he’s trying in every way possible to make sure that we know he’s so thankful for what we’ve done.
Raeanne:
I love that gratitude comes with the relief that finally we have found healing for our son. So exciting. Tell us how did you ever hear about Mercy Ships? And what caused you to go volunteer in the first place?
Paula:
The first time I heard about Mercy Ships was when I was a teenager. And the Mercy Minute was a radio program, it’s one minute long, and it was playing on our local Christian radio station. So I think we were on the way to school in the morning when I heard it. And I remember thinking, Oh, someday I’d like to do that. This was before I knew I was going to be a nurse. And growing up, I was always the very timid, shy person, like I would not speak up and wouldn’t ever want to be away from my family. And so I didn’t think through what that would mean of working with Mercy Ships and leaving the country to go to another continent. And I just stuck in my mind of Oh, someday I want to do that. And in nursing school, my sister in law knew somebody who had been on board the ship. And this was back in the day before we had smartphones and social media and all that kind of stuff. So they gave me a DVD that had videos and pictures on it. And I watched that, and then that really sunk it even deeper into me of, oh, yes, someday I want to do this. So I graduated from nursing school, got a few years of experience, and then I applied to come to the ship for one year. So that was in 2012, when I came on board for the first time. And I really thought I do this one time, and get it out of my system and then I was on board for a few months and I had this moment where I realized, I’ve been
planning this part of my life for close to 10 years now, from the time I first heard about Mercy Ships until I came on board. And then in six months, when I finished this commitment, I have no idea what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. I don’t have another like big dream of my life. And I kind of freaked out about it a little bit thinking, Oh, what am I going to do? And then I realized that coming to join the ship, while I thought it was just a dream of mine and I was doing the American thing of following your dreams, I began to realize it was actually something that God had planted in me long before I would have realized it was something I could actually do. I didn’t know I was going to be a nurse. And I didn’t think through what it would be like to live in Africa then I realized, okay, I don’t actually have to plan out the next 10 years of my life, because I think God will make it clear what I should do. And before I left the ship, at the end of that year, I bought a roundtrip ticket to return to the ship in a few months. So I had to go home because I had a job waiting for me that had given me a leave of absence to be gone for a year. And I felt I really needed to honor that. And I went home and worked for a few months so that I could actually resign from my job, and then come back to the ship again. So coming to do it for one year, and get it out of my system that clearly didn’t work, because I’ve been on board many times.
Raeanne:
Now what was it that first time that captured your heart and made you feel like you know what I mean, aside from I don’t know what I’m going to do after this. But there had to been something that compelled you and grabbed you, what was that?
Paula:
I don’t know that it’s anything I can actually articulate. It’s really difficult to describe to people what it’s like to be on the ship. So I’m on the Global Mercy now. But I’ve been on the Africa Mercy for most of my trips here. And it’s really hard to describe, there’s something really special about being on board, where you live in a community of 400 people or so you live with people, you work with people, you go to church with them, you have fun with them. It’s really like everybody all together, which is great. Sometimes you think it could be a nightmare, but somehow it all works here. Like God has to be involved in this for it to actually happen. And I just really enjoy the actual work that I do. And interacting with patients. It’s so different from working at home in a hospital setting, where generally the healthcare system is wanting to make money. And our priority here is it’s not about money at all, but it’s really about patients. And so it just feels so different from being just a job that I do, which is what I would feel like at home being a nurse, it’s still important that we have nurses at home who do a good job caring for patients. But something about being here just like fills up my soul in a way that nothing else quite has done before.
As far as the nursing part of things, being on board the ship is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my career. Simply because well there’s a lot of factors that probably go into it. But I heard one nurse describe it as saying on the ship, we get instant gratification because we see a patient who has maybe a facial tumor or both legs or a large hernia. We take them to surgery and within an hour or two for hours or whatever amount of time surgery is finished, and there is an obvious difference in the patient’s physical state. But not only that, sometimes there is a big difference in their emotional state as well. For a lot of the patients that have a physical disfigurement, they are often kind of hidden away. And then when they come on the ship, they don’t have to hide anymore. Because we treat people as humans and as people who are created in the image of God. And Dr. Garry, who’s been on board for many, many years, talks about how important it is to just touch a patient who maybe hasn’t been touched in months or years, because somebody’s afraid that they will catch whatever tumor they have. And he talks about if somebody has a disfigured face, and they only have one eye, look in that one eye, and you know, treat them as human. And so getting to do that you can actually see the patients that are with us for a length of time, they also begin to change not just because we’ve changed their physical look, but because we’ve treated them with dignity and with love. And they maybe haven’t been treated that way outside of the ship. So that’s another element of things that is really fulfilling to me to be part of.
Raeanne:
Oh, absolutely. Can you tell us about a patient that has impacted you personally?
Paula:
Well, there’s a short answer and a long answer. I was initially here as a ward nurse when I first came, and we had a patient who was getting ready to be discharged to go home. And he was going around and greeting everyone in the ward and saying goodbyes. And I don’t remember his exact surgical need, but I remember very much that he told us before he left, that he was so grateful for what we had done for him, not just because we had done surgery, but because we treated him well before he had surgery. And it was really special to actually hear a patient verbalize that, we could see the trend that their transformation of being quiet and hidden away and then gradually coming out of their shell, but this patient actually verbalized that he was so appreciative that we had treated him the same before surgery and after surgery. And that has stuck with me. That just was a really special moment.
And then the long answer is always a patient that I took care of, uh, it was in when we were in the Congo. And at that time, I was working in the outpatient clinic, which is where patients come after they’ve been discharged from the hospital, maybe to have their sutures removed or dressing changes or things like that. And this patient, her name was Angelique. And she’d had a large Facial Tumor and she ended up having some sort of complications. I don’t know the exact beginning of her story, because I was actually at home at the time. But I came back to the ship and she needed to have wound care done every single day. And it was kind of complex. So our team decided it would be the best if we had one person who would just do that every single day. So they would get to know her and doing it over and over, they would be more efficient with their time and our resources. So I was the one who took care of her the first day. And it took quite a long time as we read all the notes to make sure we were doing everything correctly. And then I did it every day for her for I’m not sure how long. But she was a patient that had come to us who was very malnourished because her tumor was one that was growing out of her mouth and she wasn’t able to have good nutrition. And then she had complications. And you know, she had a very hard road to walk. But she was so full of joy. And I got to take care of her every day and she would always be smiling and I learned how to greet her in her local language. Every time I would try to do it, she would just burst out laughing. I asked the translator is she laughing because how I say it is so bad and he would say yes. She had such an impact on me because I could see that she had been through so much difficulty and still have a lot of joy. And sorry, if I cry here. I was taking care of her after I’d come back to the ship when my dad had died.
I’d gotten home when he was on hospice, and I was home for several months and he passed away. And coming back was very difficult. Grief makes everything difficult. And something about taking care of Angelique every day really helped me to be able to find pieces of joy in the midst of hard things. So she really had an impact that she will have no idea. Beyond that, we were friends as much as two people who can’t speak the same language could be from spending time together every day. And she went back to the hospital to have another surgery, and I would go visit her on the ward. And she was just always so full of joy. And that somehow she taught me how to look for joy in the middle of really difficult things. So she’s another patient that I will never forget.
Raeanne:
Paula, that’s beautiful. And I love how God is so kind, and so gracious that he would give you joy each day in the midst of a hard season in your life, a season of grieving, he brought joy. So he is so kind. How many countries have you been to?
Paula:
So the first time I came to this ship, it was in Togo. And then that was in 2012. Then I went to Guinea, and Congo, Cameroon, Senegal, I’ve actually been in Senegal three different times. And then now in Sierra Leone.
Raeanne:
Did you always think you’d have a life of adventure like this?
Paula:
No. I was probably the least likely person to have a life that looks like this.
Raeanne:
Well, considering all the experience that you’ve had on board, both the Africa Mercy and now the Global Mercy and several developing nations, why do you think the work that you guys do is important, and why is it important to you?
Paula:
We talk on the ship about how safe, affordable and timely surgeries are important. And so that is something that we provide to people, we don’t charge anything for our surgeries, we help patients travel to get to us. So they don’t have a lot of hardship based on actually just traveling to where we are. So it’s very important, because in the countries that we serve, you might not have access to any one of those elements. So if the surgery is safe, but not affordable, it’s actually not really helpful, or if it’s safe and affordable, but you can’t do it in a timely manner and then somebody’s tumor grows too large, and then they die. Because they didn’t have timely surgery, that’s also not a good situation.
What we do is very important from the surgical side of things, but then we also have another arm that’s now called education, training and advocacy. So we not only come to a country and provide free surgeries, but we also are trying to help impact the health care system and the countries we serve through local mentoring. Right now we have some residents and some anesthesia providers and nurses who come on the ship, to work alongside us and just learn how we do things. So that is another thing that makes it really important that we want to have a lasting impact even after we’ve left a country. Somebody has said we are trying to work ourselves out of a job! You know, we would love if, eventually there’s not the need that we see now. And we have no need for a ship to come to countries to do free surgeries.
And why it’s important to me — that’s also kind of difficult to articulate, I guess. But I can’t imagine my life without having been here. So I think a lot of things I learned or just changed the way I see the world through my experience of coming on the ship and being in various countries and seeing how other people live. And yeah, I’ve had so many rewarding experiences that even when I left the ship and didn’t know when I would come back if people would ask me about it. I would always say I can’t imagine never going back to the ship. Yeah, it just really gets in your heart and soul.
Raeanne:
It’s definitely made an impact on you. And you’ve talked a lot about patients being transformed through surgery, but also just through the love and care and compassion of what they receive amongst the nurses and doctors and even crew on board that come visit them. But also you are transformed, you are a different person than you were back in 2012, before you even stepped foot on board, the Africa Mercy. Paula, as we close up our time together, tell us how you have been transformed because of your time volunteering with Mercy Ships.
Paula:
One thing that is kind of an obvious answer to this is simply the fact that I’m doing the job that I’m doing. So I am the PACU nurse team leader, which means I’m in charge of a group of people, my team is small. So at the most I’ve had six nurses underneath me, or working alongside me. But I have never in my life wanted to be in charge of anything, I was always the person who would want somebody else to take the leadership role, I was always happy to be on the sidelines in the background, didn’t want to have to speak in front of people. Then when I was planning to come back to the ship, long term, I knew that in order to do that, I would naturally fall into the team leader role. Because our staff changes over so much, we have a lot of nurses that just come for two weeks at a time. So I knew if I was going to be the person here long term, I would fall into the team leader role. And I really wasn’t sure I wanted that. But I felt likeif this is what God wanted me to do, he’s going to make it possible for me to do this then. And I remember hearing somebody talk in a meeting one time and saying that if God gave us the big picture, for, say, 10 years in advance, we might look at it and think, oh, there’s no possible way I could ever do that. And then we wouldn’t even try because it would feel too big. And for me, I really think that is the case. So I came one time to do this. And that was a huge leap of faith for me. And then but if you had told me then that I would come back 11 years later, and I would actually be in charge of something and I would be here long term and have left my home and not had a home to go back to, I would have said oh no way that that’s not possible. But whenever God just gives us one step at a time, and we then have enough faith to do the one thing that he’s telling us to do next, we do that. And then maybe the next step is a little bit bigger, and takes a little more. And he grows us to get to that point. And so all the gradual steps that seemed challenging at the time, but you get through them, and then I can look back and think oh yeah, it was difficult to come the first time. But if I had come that time, and they said, Oh, you need to leave everything behind and come here, this is going to be your actual life and you’re going to be in charge of people. I’m like, no thanks.
Now I find myself being here and it is very challenging and stretching to do something that was not ever in my plans. But I do feel as if this is what God has called me to, at least for this time. And he makes it possible if I have taken the one step of faith to give me enough to get through the next step of faith.
Raeanne:
Absolutely. Paula, thank you for saying yes to God’s plan for your life, which was much bigger than what you ever dreamed of or imagined. And thank you for sharing with us, inspiring us and encouraging us today, on your day off. We’re grateful for you and the important work you do. So thank you for sharing with us today.
Paula:
Yeah, it was an honor to talk a little bit about my life.
For more information about Mercy Ships, go to mercyships.org, and to keep up with the guests on New Mercies, follow us on Instagram at NewMerciesPodcast.