Children's nurse with inspirational story receives lifetime achievement award

By Erin Keifenheim

Be Ho, staff RN, surgery, knew she wanted to be a nurse when she was 4½ years old, yet she never imagined that following her dream would lead her on a journey to flee her home country and start a new life halfway around the world. Now celebrating her 34th year at Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota, Be recently was named the 2014 Lifetime Achievement winner in the annualMpls.St.Paul Magazine Outstanding Nurses awards for her amazing nursing skills and perseverance to follow her dream.

Be's inspirational story starts in Vietnam, where she was born. When her father had abdominal surgery in the French-run hospital there, Be was mesmerized by the French nurses with their blue eyes, long eyelashes and surgical gowns, and the kindness they showed her family. She knew from that moment that she would become a nurse someday. At the age of 9, she pleaded with her parents to send her to nursing school. She cried so much that they finally arranged a meeting for her with the director of a local hospital. He convinced her to hold off on becoming a nurse until she was old enough. Finally, when Be was 17, she couldn't wait any longer.

"At that time, nursing was looked down on as a career," Be said. "Girls were supposed to stay at home. Nurses were viewed as the ones who did the dirty work – changing diapers and cleaning wounds. I didn't dare tell my family I was applying for nursing school."

Instead, Be lied to her parents, telling them she was going to visit her cousin in the capital, but she actually took the entrance exam for nursing school. Three months later, she didn't have the heart to sneak away again to find out the results. However, her neighbor had gone to see the results of his fiancée's exam and saw Be's name on the list. He came over to congratulate her, thus breaking the news to her parents. Her mother cried and was resistant, but her father persuaded her to allow Be to go to nursing school – he knew she would be a wonderful nurse; he was right. Be went on to graduate second in her class. And because she always knew she wanted to work with children, she took a job at a children's hospital in Saigon. She eventually went on to become the hospital's director of nursing.

In 1968, Be received a scholarship to travel to England for intensive nursing care training. In 1972, she visited Minneapolis with a group of young patients who needed open-heart surgeries. The Children's Heart Fund, now Children's HeartLink, sponsored her to escort the patients and care for them while they were here. During that trip, she formed relationships with the staff at Children's – Minneapolis who thought very highly of her and recognized her potential.

"Every week I had to write an essay to the communist government saying that I was the country's enemy," Be said. "One day I was brave enough to ask why I was being forced to write these letters. They told me 'because you are such a good nurse.' It was very hard for me to say I was an enemy when all I wanted to do was provide nurturing and loving nursing care – just like the French nurses I saw as a child."

Eventually, Be became worried about her future in Vietnam. Her colleagues at Children's Heart Fund attempted to evacuate her in 1975, but she couldn't bear to leave without saying goodbye to her family. Though she feared for her life, she said a tearful goodbye to her friends and remained in Vietnam. A few years later, she knew it was time to escape. She contacted her U.S. colleagues for assistance, under the guise that she needed to have open-heart surgery in Japan.

"I had to lie again to escape Vietnam. If I was caught, I would be sent to a concentration camp," Be said. "I told the hospital I was working for that my grandmother was dying, when she had actually died before I was born."

Arrangements were made for Be to travel by boat to a refugee camp in Thailand.

"I had to leave without saying goodbye to my family. I wanted to protect them in case the communist government came looking for me. I wrote a letter to my dad and left. It was very scary," she said. "I didn't know anyone. It was getting dark. We had to hide under coconut leaves on the boat to disguise ourselves from the communist police who were chasing us. When we finally made it to international waters, I was so happy I cried."

"I knew I wanted to work at Children's Hospital," Be said. "It was a place of comfort for me. I talked with the director of nursing, but because my nursing papers and transcripts were thrown overboard by pirates during my escape, I had no official paperwork. They hired me as a nursing assistant in the PICU, and I was so grateful."

With the help of a Children's scholarship, Be went back to school full time and got her associate's degree in nursing from Minneapolis Community and Technical College. She was then hired as a registered nurse at Children's and worked on 4 East (now the sixth floor), before eventually transferring to surgery.

Be is now the urology team leader in the surgery department and works with surgeons and staff to make sure they have the instruments and supplies needed for a variety of surgeries. She works to onboard new surgery nurses in urology and across other services, too.

"With every patient she works with, Be is calm, comforting and compassionate," said Pat Buzzell, patient care manager for the surgery department. "She takes care of the whole family, reassures them and educates them so surgery isn't a scary experience. She comes in on her days off to conduct patient family tours, and she often stays late to check in on patients. She does whatever it takes to make families comfortable, using her cheerful personality to calm their fears and put them at ease."

Be still has a deep love for Vietnam and returns there on medical missions to provide care for children at the hospital where she used to work. She has recruited Children's surgeons and staff to join her on these trips, where they provide education to medical teams and perform surgeries.

Now almost 70 and pondering when to retire, Be gets emotional when she thinks about potentially leaving Children's – her second home.