My Why: In a moment, Krista Cardamone went from staff to parent at SickKids — and chose to stay after loss

In her daughter’s room in an inpatient oncology unit at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) — a unit where she’d worked closely with staff for a decade as an Infection Control Practitioner at the hospital — Krista Cardamone remembers thinking: What happened?  

It was August 2012 and her daughter Leah was just four weeks old. Cardamone had brought her to a clinic appointment at the hospital where she was born to ask about a small concern. At the recommendation of staff there, she brought Leah to SickKids’ Emergency Department. A blood test, ultrasound and other testing led to the diagnosis of infant acute lymphoblastic leukemia. 

Cardamone knew unit 8A and its staff well from her work, which involved conducting daily consults and reviews of patient charts, checking with staff on a regular basis about infection control or patients who were in isolation, answering staff questions and providing other related education on the unit. 

“All of a sudden, completely within a moment, I was on the other side of it.” 

Knowing the staff on the unit provided some comfort, but being there as a parent was “completely different.”  

“We were here,” Cardamone says, “and then essentially never really went home until the fall.” 

That night, she and her husband arranged for their two-and-a-half-year-old son’s grandparents to watch him. The next morning Leah was taken to Image-Guided Therapy (IGT), where she got line placements for her chemotherapy. She was such a “sweetheart,” Cardamone says, that as her treatment progressed, nurses would argue about who got to carry her into the IGT room – because they all wanted to hold her.  

‘Nothing unthought of’ 

Leah’s bright personality lighting up the room was a constant throughout their time at SickKids, even prompting a phlebotomist to remark that they couldn’t draw blood, because she was looking at them and smiling. She was “such a happy baby,” Cardamone says. “You would never know what she was going through — she always had a smile on her face.”

Another constant was staff going out of their way to support the family. On a quiet night in the waiting room of the Post-Anesthetic Care Unit (PACU), the anesthesiologist came out to sit and talk to Krista as she sat by herself. Nurses always excitedly asked Krista’s son what costume he’d wear on his next visit, after he dressed up as a superhero on Halloween. The Patient Service Aide who cleaned Leah’s room in the mornings would always talk to her and smile at her.  

Special occasions stand out, too. At Christmas, when the family hadn’t planned to be at the hospital but Leah ended up needing to be admitted, Santa came to visit and the family spent Christmas Eve together. For Leah’s 1st birthday, staff decorated her room and they had a small party. 

“It was a lot of treating our family as a whole,” Cardamone says. “Leah was a baby, so it was all of us — making sure our son was enjoying himself, playing and spending time with him, and making sure I was OK.” 

The Paediatric Advanced Care Team (PACT) was heavily involved with Cardamone’s family. When Leah passed away in September 2013, the PACT physician came in — after midnight — to see Cardamone and her family. 

Now, more than a decade later, when she and her husband look back at Leah’s illness — “the worst thing you could go through” — it’s those positive memories they were able to make as a family, and the lengths staff would go to make them happen, that shine through. 

“There was nothing unthought of — they think of everything, and I think it’s genuinely how they function.”   

‘They do have an impact’ 

Cardamone had stayed connected with her small Infection Prevention and Control (IPAC) team while at the hospital with Leah — they’d visited and checked in regularly.  

After Leah passed away, she took some time to think about if she would return to SickKids as an employee. She wondered how it would feel to pass people who cared for Leah in the hallways at work, but she also thought of the way SickKids staff had brought positivity into her family’s experience.  

“I decided I wanted to come back and hopefully be nearly as impactful to patients and families as those who we met along our journey,” she says.   

It wasn’t easy, she says, but her team was accommodating and shifted her portfolio so she wasn’t covering the units where she’d stayed with Leah. 

In the years since, Cardamone has found that passing people in the hallways “is a happy thing.” She says it’s comforting to see staff who were part of her family’s experience, who still ask how she’s doing, and to be connected to the spaces in the hospital that were part of the experience. Her son remembers coming to the Women’s Auxillary Volunteers (WAV) PlayPark, and when it was renovated she told him it looks different now. She’s also visited the photo of Leah that’s on the wall on unit 8A.   

Today, Cardamone is the Infection Control Practitioner involved with SickKids’ campus redevelopment plan Project Horizon, and she invariably brings her experience as a SickKids parent to meetings and discussions. She knows things that may seem small are anything but for families, pointing to hospital activities like annual Halloween celebrations. 

“From an Infection Prevention and Control perspective, we get asked questions and I think I used to think and say things before, until I was on the other side and realized what things are important as a patient and family here,” she says.  

Sometimes, Cardamone says, she looks back at the care and support her family received and thinks it was so thoughtful because staff knew her. But she knows it’s how they are with everyone. 

“I think it’s innate in a lot of them. It’s who they are, it’s their personality,” she says. “I hope they realize when they go home at the end of the day, the things they do for patients and families do hit home. They do have an impact.” 

“The bulk of the short time we had with Leah was spent in the hospital, and because of the love and support of SickKids staff, the memories we have are positive and are ones that we will hold with us forever.”