Employee of the Month found her second family at Boone
Michelle Crane is Boone Hospital Center’s Employee of the Month for July 2014. Click here to nominate someone for Employee of the Month.
“There is a never a dull moment in the Emergency Department,” says Michelle Crane, unit secretary. But she wouldn’t want it any other way: “I like the intensity. When the team goes into action to save a life, we’re all involved. We all have a role. It feels good to be a part of that.”
As unit secretary, Michelle serves as the hub for patient care in a critical area, arranging tests and screenings, entering data and physician orders, placing urgent phone calls, acquiring beds for newly admitted patients, and more. In such a fast-paced area of the hospital, her role is to be the calming entity and to keep things running smoothly.
“You have to keep calm for staff, patients and family members. Getting excited would only make things difficult,” Michelle explains. “You’ve got to keep your spirits up.”
Often, Michelle accomplishes this by remembering a poem her Dad taught her, Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” which opens “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs…”
In addition to the Emergency Department, Michelle works for nursing support services and provides coverage for unit secretaries in other patient care areas. She joined Boone Hospital Center in October 2007 as a unit secretary in the Cardiology unit.
When asked what she loves most about working at Boone Hospital Center, Michelle immediately says it’s the people she works with. She especially enjoys working with Emergency Department manager Beth Eidson. “I hold such respect for her. Working for Beth is truly a blessing.
“You can’t beat the staff,” she continues “They’ve turned into my family.”
During a difficult time a few years ago, when Michelle’s father required hospice care immediately after she herself had been hospitalized and had used up her Earned Time Off, her Boone family donated ETO so that she could take care of her own family.
Both families mean a lot to Michelle. When she’s not at work, she loves spending time with her daughter Jennifer, son-in-law Joel and grandchildren Oliver and Finn. She also volunteers at the Food Bank, tends to a plot in the Community Garden, and enjoys swimming, walking and biking on the Katy Trail.
She also walks seven-and-a-half miles from home to work and back and has even walked to work in the snow, including this years’ blizzards and the storm in winter 2011. “I’m from Rapid City, South Dakota,” she says. “So snow doesn’t scare me.”
Indeed, it would take more than a blizzard to keep Michelle away from her job. She says, “It makes a world of difference when you wake up in the morning and tell yourself, ‘I get to go to work today.’”