She Didn’t Want to Be a Paediatric Nurse, Until a Doctor Told Her She Already Was One
This is the fifth story in Raffy's Village: a series about the people holding up this world beyond the family at the centre of it. Behind every allergy appointment, every plan and every phone call is a human being who chose to be there.
This one belongs to Carolina, an incredibly experienced Paediatric Allergy nurse who loves her job, and who took one of the longest, winding roads to that job that anyone could.
When Carolina was little, she told her mum she was going to be a paediatrician. She has no memory of saying it. Her mum, apparently, never let her forget it.
The context
The path from that childhood announcement to a Paediatric Allergy ward was anything but direct.
After school, Carolina studied graphic design, then decided, by her own admission, that her busy mind needed something else. She trained in natural therapies instead.
She's quick to clarify that she isn't technically a naturopath, because she never believed in homeopathy, so she describes herself as a western herbal medicine practitioner. She worked in that world for years, but not at the clinic bench: she was on the research side, in product development, finding the evidence to back the products being built.
One lecturer from that time shaped everything that came after.
He gave her a way of seeing research that she still uses: you have to understand what's happening to be able to help people, and you have to understand where people are coming from.
It's the reason she loves research, and the reason she describes her appetite for learning as an act of giving back rather than a personal ambition. As she puts it, she can't help someone with a heart problem, because she doesn't know enough about hearts. Knowing things is what makes helping possible.
It was the same lecturer who planted the idea she'd stayed away from for years. He suggested she also study nursing.
The thing that changed her most
Ask Carolina what event changed her the most and she answers immediately, a little apologetically, because she knows how common the answer is: becoming a mother.
But it isn't really motherhood she's describing. It's the journey to it.
It took ten years for her to have her son, and he is the only child she has. Throughout that decade she wasn't a nurse.
She had no family in healthcare, no one she could ask, and no way of judging whether the specialist she was seeing was any good beyond the research she'd managed to do herself. There was no social media to compare notes on, either. She remembers not knowing what to do, or who to trust, while navigating a system she didn't understand.
That experience never left her.
It's why she says she's more understanding of patients and their frustrations along the journey than she might otherwise have been. And it shaped something even bigger: she is certain that if she'd been able to have the large family she'd imagined, she would never have become a nurse.
She might have gone back to study, but down a completely different road.
In her view, the whole path, from the waiting to the nursing degree to the allergy ward, is one connected story.
What changed
When her son was small, Carolina went back to university and enrolled in nursing, and it clicked in a way nothing else had. It suited her science-minded brain and her need for clarity when making decisions.
As a new graduate, she asked for the emergency department and was placed in oncology instead, which she still loved working there.
Then came the question she remembers vividly: are you going to paeds? She didn't want to. She adored children, and still couldn't explain why she had no interest in working with them professionally. The doctor she was working alongside wasn't having it. You're a paediatric nurse, he told her. You just don't know it yet.
She went, reluctantly. A little while later, the same doctor came to find her. She told him he'd been right.
She won't say she'd never go back to adults. Plenty of paediatric nurses insist they never would, and she doesn't make that promise. But she's honest that she wouldn't be as happy without children in her working day.
In her words, “you can't resist a little cute face”.
Allergy was the natural landing place, and for more than one reason. She'd always wanted to work in research, and allergy gave her that. It was also personal long before it was professional: allergic conditions run through her family.
Her mum has had anaphylaxis several times, and her own son lives with allergies, eczema and hay fever. She's been on both sides of this world, as a nurse and as a parent.
What it's like now
Carolina describes herself as a lucky girl, and she means it. The doctors and nurses in her allergy department are people she genuinely loves working with. The patients are lovely, and the families are lovely, and after years of wanting more children than she could have, she says with a laugh that she now gets all her baby love at work.
What she brings to the job is something no training can fully teach.
She knows what it's like to be a parent staring at a system you don't understand. And she knows how big a small thing can feel from the other side of the desk.
The worst thing anyone can say to a parent, she says, is that something is wrong with their child. It doesn't matter how minor a nurse or a doctor thinks it is. To the parent, their child the most precious thing in the world, and they don't want anything to happen to them.
That's the lens she brings into every appointment, and it's why her empathy doesn't feel like a technique. It comes from somewhere real.
Who she is, outside of it
Ask Carolina for ten words and she warns you it's going to be messy, because she hasn't prepared. She starts with the descriptions she agrees with: loud, feisty, opinionated, kind.
Then the ones the people around her would add: non-judgmental, according to her husband, because however strongly she holds an opinion, she always tries to see the other person's perspective.
Philanthropic, because she's sponsored a World Vision child since she was seventeen and loves fundraising.
Maternal, more every year.
A workaholic, which a friend generously rewrote as good work ethic, and which Carolina refuses to accept.
A supporter of the underdog. Independent, her mum's word, and an independent thinker, which she explains by saying that if someone told her they didn't like you, she'd meet you and decide for herself. Loyal, to a fault.
She is also, she admits, more reserved than people expect. She comes across as confident, but she isn't always, especially in the public eye, and she doesn't like being the centre of attention.
Her priorities are simple to name, and harder to practise. Her son, her family, and her friends' families come first, with her son described as his own universe. Then her health, because she still feels twenty and knows she has to look after it.
Then giving back, being a good person, doing something good in the world, whether through work or beyond it. She admits that prioritising herself is probably one of her failures, but laughs that she suspects most people say the same.
When asked what makes her happy to be alive, she says it's the question she found hardest, because she's simply a happy person.
She thinks you have to be happy within yourself, and she's honest that she recognises not everyone is that lucky. For her, it's small things: her son telling her he loves her, the cute, happy kids at work, the people she works with.
Working in healthcare has taught her that life is precious and short. She jokes that she's allowed to whinge as much as she likes precisely because she's happy. Her dad has a standard response whenever she complains: what have you got to complain about?
What the people close to her say
The way the people around Carolina talk about her tells you a lot.
A close friend says the thing she hates most about her is that she's usually right. Carolina has a gut feeling for things she can't explain. She says she can often tell when someone is pregnant before they know themselves, and won't say it out loud unless she's certain, even though she couldn't tell you how she knows.
That instinct sits alongside a very different side of her, and she's aware people find it hard to reconcile. She loves her herbs, she's spiritual, and she's a little religious in some ways. She also works in a department full of hard-science thinkers and doesn't back down on the evidence. She describes herself as yin and yang: completely at opposite ends, and genuinely both.
She's equally candid about how she argues. She says she can come across as rude or harsh in the moment, and she'll fight for something she believes in. But she always steps back afterwards and reflects on what was said, even if the other person doesn't believe she's listening.
Tell me the truth, she says, because you can't become a better person if you won't accept you aren't perfect. She also believes in a bigger purpose, and that if you don't fix what you need to fix in this life, you'll come back and do it again.
She applies the same gut instinct to the work she's helping build around her. She has a feeling there's something there, she says, and the only thing to do is keep going.
Why it matters
What stays with you about Carolina's story is how unlikely every step of it was: graphic design, herbal medicine, product research, ten years of waiting for her precious son, an unplanned placement in oncology, a doctor who saw the paediatric nurse in her before she did.
None of it looks like a plan, and all of it turns out to be a preparation.
It also says something about the people in a family's allergy journey who rarely get the spotlight. The nurse in the clinic isn't a function.
She's a person who once sat where the parents are sitting, with no one to ask, unsure who to trust. That's the quality families can't see on a credentials page, and it's often the thing that makes a hard appointment feel survivable.
That, in the end, is what this series is for: reminding us that behind every protocol is someone who chose to care, and has a story about why.
This article is based on a conversation with Carolina and reflects her own experience and views only, not those of her employer.
This is what the village is for: not only the parents and the founders, but the people who show up for families every day. Carolina's story is another thread of that. If yours belongs here too, we'd love to hear it.