In the News

Caregiver administers high dose of compassion
Nurse practitioner is honored for her work

By Adrienne P. Samuels, Globe Staff | November 6, 2006

Cleopatra Ferrao worries when her patients miss appointments.

So she created a solution uncommon in today's harried world: She lovingly pesters them until they come in for a check-up.

"She calls me at 10 o'clock at night, and hounds me on a Sunday," said Myriam René, 30, whose mother is one of Ferrao's many patients at the Mattapan Community Health Center. "She did try me during normal business hours, but she knew that I was a night owl."

Ferrao, a nurse practitioner, also knows where her patients live. She talks regularly with the nurse who visits them at home.

She knows that Myriam René must accompany her mother to the appointment, so that someone can translate her questions into Haitian Creole.

She also checks up on the elderly Renés when their daughter is out of town.

Boston's Kenneth B. Schwartz Center, an agency specializing in the study and advancement of what is called "compassionate care," is honoring Ferrao's way of connecting with her patients. She is the agency's eighth annual winner of the Compassionate Caregiver Award, and she beat out 140 other applicants for the honor, which included a convention center gala last week and $5,000.

Several patients, as well as Ferrao's boss, nominated her for the prize. Their letters overflowed with praise for a woman who continued to see patients while fighting her own bout with cancer, and while receiving radiation treatments daily at 6 a.m. That cancer is now in remission, thanks in part to the patients, Ferrao said. She never hid her illness from them. They never shielded their prayers from her.

She gave each her cellphone number.

"A lot of my patients come from cultures where they never took medicine, and never in their life did they have to take five or six tablets," said Ferrao, 57, who lives in Quincy, was born in Kenya, and was raised in both Tanzania and India.

In those cultures, she said, Western medicine is a last resort. "In India, they'll try any possible medicine they can before they finally come to the hospital. Most cultures are like that. I think this is easier for me because of that."

Ferrao's father was a welder in Kenya. He was also a romantic who named his eldest daughter after an Egyptian queen he had seen in a 1940s black-and-white movie. The Roman Catholic priest said it was a pagan name. Her father made it more Catholic by adding the middle name Perpetua.

They lived near the beach, just outside of Mombasa. Some children taunted her by singing the words "Queen of the Nile." She hated it.

The family moved to Tanzania until she was a teen, and they moved to Mumbai, the city then known as Bombay.

One afternoon, she ran into a friend on the way to nursing school, tagged along, and promptly signed up. This did not make her father happy, since nursing was not a noble profession at the time in her culture. Still, she graduated and became a midwife.

Then she married a man she had met on a bus to Delhi, and the second half of her world tour began. She itched to leave India, so they tried Australia and Canada before moving to the United States in 1985. They brought their three children with them.

Within 72 hours of landing, Ferrao and her husband got jobs. Still jet-lagged, they had to come up with the rent, which they paid to their landlord, a Polish immigrant who liked to see another immigrant family working for the American dream. Ferrao again went to nursing school, this time at the University of Massachusetts.

"After working in three-year stints for various medical practices, she landed at the Mattapan Community Health Center, a place where most patients are immigrants, and where few speak English as a first language. She felt she could help these people, from Haiti, Ghana, Nigeria, and Cameroon, many of whom believed in prayer, herbal remedies, and the shortcomings of Western medicine.

"She's into holistic medicine, and she treats the mind as well as the body," said Cheryl Murray, a patient who also works at the state passport agency. "She's fussing at you not because she's supposed to, but because she cares about you."

Healthcare workers who have won the Compassionate Award were tapped because of their sensitivity and empathy, their clinical skills, and their listening skills. Ferrao was a finalist because she administers common sense as well as medicine.

"She's the kind of person you want when you get sick," said Julie Rosen, executive director of the Schwartz Center. "The average consumer doesn't realize the sacrifice of caregivers. It's a very tough job."

Adrienne P. Samuels can be reached at asamuels@globe.com.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.