When Hurricane Sandy battered her way across the East Coast, the stage was set for medical staff to become heroes.
According to The Star Ledger, Mavis Doozie was one person who went beyond the nursing jobs she was trained for and delivered a baby in the front seat of a station wagon 36 hours after Sandy made landfall.
Doozie, a trained community health nurse, was called into action when a desperate father got stuck in traffic caused by power outages. Quadir Brooks was trying to get his pregnant wife to the hospital when his car became gridlocked. With the baby already on the way, he shouted for help and Doozie responded.
Despite having never delivered a baby, Doozie was able to draw on the experience of her mother who had held a number of nursing jobs in Ghana. As a trained member of the profession, she was able to not only help the mother give birth in a car but also provide her with breast-feeding advice.
"In nursing school, you are trained to expect anything, and to have everything at your disposal," said Doozie. "And if you don’t, you have to improvise, safely."
Figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that nursing jobs are among the fastest growing in the U.S., with an anticipated annual growth of 26 percent between 2010 and 2020.