Like many American nurses, Nicholas Sydow has a story about working in a hospital during the time of COVID, but it’s not the one you’ve heard before. Born and raised in Wisconsin, Nicholas met his wife, Natalie, at nursing school at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. In January 2020, the couple welcomed their second child. Around the same time, Nicholas, who had been experiencing some vertigo, underwent a few tests. He remembers receiving the results of an MRI scan just after taking their baby home from the hospital: Nicholas had been diagnosed with brain cancer.
“I received the phone call the night we brought our daughter home. It was a crazy time for us,” he says, thinking back.
Today Nicholas, 36, is healthy and feels fortunate to have received excellent care and made a recovery. Both he and his wife practice at UW Hospital in Madison, Nicholas in interventional radiology and Natalie in the Heart and Vascular Procedure Center.
“Despite the pandemic, my healthcare experience was great, and the entirety of the treatment went smoothly,” he says. “I’m very thankful.”
The Road to Nursing
Nicholas’s journey as a nurse is both familiar and unique. He grew up in Marshfield, Wisconsin, smack in the middle of the state and roughly equidistant from Milwaukee and Minneapolis. Born into a close-knit family that stressed education, Nicholas spent a summer after high school helping to care for his grandmother, a widow who suffered from Alzheimer’s but insisted on remaining in her own home. The experience shaped his views of medicine and what it might be like to care for others professionally.
“We had a very set schedule, as you can imagine, with somebody who is going through Alzheimer’s disease and just how debilitating it can be,” Nicholas says. “It was great to spend time with her, but sad at the same time — to see your grandma, your own family, not really know what’s going on.”
During summer breaks from studying for his nursing degree, he took a job as a nursing assistant in a cardiac rehabilitation unit near his home. There, he performed tasks such as obtaining vitals and helping patients with the activities of daily living. Clinical coursework at UW Oshkosh gave him further opportunities to see what different areas of nursing practice were like, and he gravitated toward critical care.
After graduating in 2010, Nicholas went to work in a small ICU unit in Milwaukee while Natalie, then still his girlfriend, went to work in Appleton, a two-hour drive away. After two years of long distance, the pair, having always wanted to see California, decided to hit the road as travel nurses. They did six-month assignments in Silicon Valley and the Palm Springs area and were driving over the Rockies on their way back home for a summer of friends’ weddings when Natalie received a call from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Would they both be interested in travel nursing in Wisconsin’s capital for a while?
“That’s the travel nursing story, right?” says Nicholas. “You’re just driving, not really sure what’s next, you know? We both got an assignment on the same unit. That was in 2013, and we’re still at UW today.”
A Shift to Radiology
Nicholas and Natalie both worked for a time on a medical surgical unit, but there were openings in radiology, and the idea of being more involved in diagnostic and interventional procedures appealed to Nicholas.
“At that time, I honestly had no idea what radiology nursing was,” says Nicholas, noting that his radiology unit has more than 60 nurses now. He assists with everything from prepping to sedation to emergencies like stroke treatment. “I love the variety of it. Every day is so different. I get a lot of fulfillment in being part of the active treatment team in the procedure areas.”
Nicholas enjoys his time between the lead role and staffing all the different modalities of radiology. In the leadership role, he oversees the complex scheduling of staff for the hospital’s inpatient and outpatient radiology department, taking into account patients’ acuity levels. “It’s like you’re putting a puzzle together every day,” he says.
Because he was a patient in his own hospital, Nicholas recalls getting pushed past a group of his colleagues wishing him well as he headed into surgery. This gives him chills to this day. Having surgery and subsequent scans in the unit he works in has changed his perspective on his current role.
“It really gives me an elevated level of respect for the patients and what they’re going through … I have literally been in their shoes,” Nicholas says. “Then, on the flip side, I respect those nurses, techs, anesthesiologists, surgeons, and the whole healthcare system. I mean, they’re really an amazing team.”
Nicholas’s medical treatments went well, and though he won’t know for several years if he is in full remission, for now he is healthy and all his scans have been clean. He and Natalie have their hands full with work and caring for two kids, aged 3 and 6, with help from his parents and Nicholas’s younger sister Samantha, an ICU nurse in Madison.
“My life was good before my diagnosis,” says Nicholas. “I have always been a positive person with a lot to be grateful for, but now there is not a lot that fazes me. We are very blessed to have a great family and friends.”
“On a daily basis, I see patients going through similar health issues that I have. I am very fortunate to have a career in helping these people.”
Nicholas was one of the subjects of GE HealthCare’s Canvases of Care campaign for Nurses Week. New York–based artist Tim Okamura has created paintings of Nicholas and four other nurses. Each painting contains one brushstroke for every hour of care the nurses have put in over the course of their careers — Nicholas’s has 18,200 strokes — and the paintings will remain unfinished, because a nurse’s work is never done.
