Phillylacrosse.com, Posted 4/9/20
From Press Release
The medical profession has always been a challenging field. However, the recent outbreak of COVID-19 may prove to be one of the largest challenges that people in the healthcare profession will face.
For former Temple Lacrosse player Avery Longstaff (Cocalico High, PA), facing a challenge is the reason she entered the field.
“I chose nursing because I wanted to be challenged,” she said. “I wanted to be a part of a team, and I wanted to be able to connect with and support people in a really direct way,” Avery explained.
Nursing is a profession that runs in the family for the Longstaffs. Avery’s twin sister and former Temple Lacrosse teammate, Kari (Cocalico) looks to her mother as a major driver for her entrance into nursing. “My mom is a nurse and we watched her work her way from stay at home mom to CNA to LPN to RN and eventually to BSN. She was certainly an inspiration for us,” Kari added.
Following their graduation in 2016, the sisters quickly found nursing positions in Philadelphia. Kari is currently a nurse at The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania on a medicine floor that specializes in lung and liver transplants. Avery began her career in the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She has since moved on to work as a travel nurse in the CICU at the Children’s Hospital of Colorado.
The Longstaff twins both look at their time as Temple student-athletes as a major building block to prepare them for a career in nursing. “As an athlete, you learn how to lead but you also learn the importance of knowing your role well and being able to execute it under pressure” said Avery. She added “whether it’s on the field or in the ICU, the skill set is similar. You have to be able to work hard, be adaptable, and be resilient.”
“Being a nursing major while playing lacrosse was a very humbling experience” Kari explained, “In the end it helped me to develop time management skills, flexibility and resilience.”
Throughout their lives, family has been incredibly important to the Longstaffs. Both Kari and Avery point to their mother as a major inspiration. “Her path to nursing was not traditional nor easy but throughout our childhood, she worked her way from a CNA position to earning her bachelor’s degree in the spring of 2016, the same year that Kari and I earned ours. She is strong, compassionate, and resilient and I want to be all of those things too” Avery added.
In addition to their mother’s inspiration, they have always been able to depend on one another. While looking back at her journey with her sister, Kari explained, “We studied together, made up missed practices/lifts/conditioning sessions together and we leaned on each other when one of us struggled.”
In the trying times the healthcare field is facing in 2020 having family to fall back on becomes even more valuable. “Especially in a situation like the one we are facing now, when we are feeling so much fear and uncertainty related to work and life in general, I feel so lucky to have Kari” Avery said.
The COVID-19 virus has changed the way that the twins have to approach their jobs each and every day. For Kari, she is seeing different patients than her usual assignment, “I work on a lung and liver transplant floor, but I am now helping to staff the floors designated for covid-19 positive patients. My shifts look different because I am on a different floor, with nurses and doctors from all over the hospital, taking care of covid-19 patients.”
Avery has not seen significant change in her day to day, however, she noted: “We have made efforts to conserve PPE and that raises some concern for safety, but I don’t think that the pediatric hospitals have been impacted nearly as significantly as the adult hospitals in the area.”
With the support their family offers, a background of working hard as a student-athlete and passion for facing a challenge, the Longstaff twins, are ready to face the difficult times presently facing the world.
