ROANOKE, Va. – People across the country are celebrating nurses who go above and beyond to help their patients during National Nurses Week.
Carilion honors those nurses every month with the Daisy Award.
"This is a very hard job, and most of the time, it's a pretty thankless job," Carilion trauma nurse Meagan Redding said.
For nurses like Redding, whether or not to go above and beyond for a patient isn't even a question.
"You kind of have to put yourself in their shoes continuously also because they're going through something that we see every day," Redding said.
She works in the intensive care unit at Carilion.
"Trauma is basically just an uprooting of their life, so it's a big shock to families," Redding said.
Redding said a lot of times, family members aren't there to vouch for the patient, and that's where nurses comes in.
"She helped orchestrate moving of some of our critical patients that helped us get them off of the life support that they were on," registered respiratory therapist Douglas Hundley said.
Hundley knew the first time he worked with Redding that she was special.
"She fought for her patient, she showed her strength and compassion for the family and just wouldn't take no for an answer," Hundley said.
"It was one of those situations where I just kind of felt like something was going wrong and it was going wrong quickly, so I just had to keep calling them to say, ‘Look, we need to do something about this,’" Redding said.
Redding is one of thousands of nurses doing more than what's expected of them on a daily basis.
"We’re here for the patients. We don't just clock in and go to work, clock in and we take care of people, we carry them home with us, too, and she didn't want to carry that part of that patient home, so she stayed and kept the fight going," Hundley said.
"If I can help make an impact with them, too, I feel like I’ve accomplished something," Redding said.