Angie Burns, staff nurse at Eskenazi Health Family Beginnings, had many reasons to relocate to Florida: relatives living there, memories of July vacations, her son Christian’s decision to enroll at Universal Technical Institute in Orlando, her husband Chris’s urging and lucrative employment offers.

Just one thing was keeping her back: she loved her job at Eskenazi Health. “When you know you have it good,” she says, “ why would you look elsewhere?”

Still, she was torn because “when it’s between your family and your job,” she says, “you’re always going to pick your family.”

Burns brought her dilemma to Elizabeth “Beth” Kleeman, clinical manager of inpatient RNs in Family Beginnings. The two of them had worked together for 27 years. To Burns, Kleeman “feels more like a sister than she feels like a manager, and how we feel about that unit is special because we have such a cohesiveness . . . . It feels like a family.”

Kleeman suggested they try grouping Burns’s days together, with Thursday through Sunday shifts and nine days off in between. Burns knew that at 54, a stacked schedule would not be easy for her. Her husband agreed, however, that it was worth a try. She could stay at his dad’s while in Indianapolis, he said. Kleeman suggested an alternative room for rent nearby. When Burns requested a delay to the start of her new schedule to get her son settled in first, her managers supported that decision too.

“Bottom line, they were there for me,” she says. “They were there. They made it happen. Their flexibility was amazing . . . . I was just really touched.”

Burns has always loved working in labor and delivery. The “closest to heaven that you will ever get is the birth of your child . . . . I still cry when I see the parents cry and the joy. But I also cry when I see their loss,” she says. The patients that Eskenazi Health serves, especially disadvantaged populations, motivate Burns, who believes it is important to live “a purpose-driven life. It needs to be everywhere,” she says, “not just in your family, but in your work.”

The lure of the peaceful neighborhood where she lives in Florida, with crane sightings and beaches nearby, may be a strong inducement to stay put, but when Burns has tried out other workplaces, something was always missing. Describing her team in Family Beginnings, Burns says, “As you go in and you see these faces, and they make you laugh . . . they kind of lift you up when you’re having a rough one . . . . ”

Since nursing can be so challenging, a unit that is well trained and ready to back her up is crucial to Burns. Memories of camaraderie also move her, as when she’d shared her infertility struggles with her unit and a coworker hugged her after learning she was finally pregnant with her first child, Abby, now 24.

Burns recalls when Eskenazi Health helped her manage time off to care for her parents, and when an obstetrician/gynecologist who had worked with her team, Hua Meng, M.D., was so helpful in his care for her beloved relative, who was struggling with health priorities after a troubling diagnosis.

Reflecting on these experiences and her workplace’s support during them, Burns says, the “whole unit, the core people I love so much, played a part in every stage in my life.” Despite the difficulty of juggling between two states, “I will retire there [at Eskenazi Health] . . . . I’ve been married to my husband for 27 years, but I’ve been also alongside all of these lovely people . . . . ”

She adds that “all of those people that have touched my heart in so many years is something you can’t tangibly touch or show. But the impact that I have had with patients and with those friends that I’ve made is indescribable; it really is . . . . You can take that with you, the memories . . . . ”