Care-giver and Life-giver
In 12-hour shifts, Ellen Bradshaw Sherrill, a nurse, compassionately labors over the care of dozens on 3-East. The mother/baby floor of UT Medical Center was her training ground, so she was more than familiar with the process of delivering her first born.
While it didn’t go according to plan, she still had the joyful glow of motherhood after Molly was delivered on a Thursday morning by an emergency C-section.
“Are you leaving?” Ellen asked her mom exhaustedly, but with a smile, after being wheeled back into the hospital room from holding her miracle child for the first time Friday.
“It’s been a long two days for you,” her mom said sweetly. “You’ve got to get better so you can see Molly in the morning. I’ll be back in the morning.”
Ellen’s father calmly whispered “Now, don’t you worry about anything,” as he softly kissed her forehead. “Oh, Daddy, I am not at all worried,” she said, strangely peaceful, despite the war of pain and swollenness her body battled from delivery complications.
By the next morning, a ravaging infection made breathing a chore, forcing her to be monitored in ICU. By the wee hours of Sunday morning, her heart began failing.
At 26, on Dec. 16, 2012, she died where she found and gave her greatest joy, first as a nurse, and then as a mother.
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can...”
Dangling past her waist, an oversized yellow-and-red stethoscope hugs her tiny three-year-old neck. One hand grips a flashlight while the other carries a shiny black doctor’s bag filled with primary colored, plastic doll-saving tools.
Anything but child’s play, Ellen’s curiosity unlocked adventures in mimicking school days and motherhood through dress-up.
An American Girl doll resembling Ellen—with its dark brown hair and glasses—became her “baby.” Molly was her name, and at 9, Ellen proclaimed, “When I become a mom, my little girl’s name is going to be Molly.”
Her self-assured stick-to-it-iveness threaded its way through piano and dance lessons, swimming, and horseback riding. Even in being a protective, sometimes “bossy” big sister to her brother, Trey.
“She was only two-and-half years older,” Trey says smiling, “but growing up, she was the big sister who could get me to do anything—eat a worm, grass, dirt, or whatever.”
Long after putting away her toys and childish ways, medicine was still there, tugging at Ellen’s heart and mind. By high school, after countless casual, brain-picking conversations with a neighbor who is a doctor, her calling to be a nurse practitioner in women’s health was cemented.
Upon graduating from McMinn Central High School in Athens, Tenn., she followed in the “orange” footsteps of legions of family members, including her parents, with ties to UT. She talked about attending East Tennessee State University and she strongly considered Vanderbilt. But UT always felt like her home away from home.
By her junior year, Ellen was steeped in the university’s competitive nursing program. And like a sponge, she kept absorbing. Beyond the typical semester, she would dive into a science course during the summer at a community college in an effort to stay on, if not above, par. With steely determination, she conquered challenging chemistry and physics courses. She relished in the light bulb moments of reaffirming her nurse’s heart, from the ER to suicide watch, during every externship and clinical training sessions at Fort Sanders Regional and UT medical centers.
In 2008, after receiving her bachelor’s degree with high honors in science and nursing, she kept going, completing her master’s in nursing and licensing as a nurse practitioner two years later.
“I wanted to be just like her,” says Ellen’s cousin, Lindsey Wheeler, through sobbing tears.
“When we were young, I wanted to always be her playmate; I just loved being around her. I wanted to be a nurse like her. With her as my inspiration, I am now in pharmacy school. In every way, I want to be a phenomenal force just like her.”
Holding down two part-time nursing jobs, Ellen would often leave one shift at Lisa Ross Birth & Women’s Center in Knoxville and drive close to 30 minutes to All Women’s Care at Blount Memorial Hospital in Maryville. Never complaining, she was grateful to be a tireless advocate, even if it meant clocking in more than 40 hours a week.
“The fact that Ellen chose to work with us,” explains Lisa Ross Clinical Director Sherri Hedberg, “was a testimony to her giving heart and desire to help women and children above the role of a nurse practitioner.”
Instinctively, Hedberg knew Ellen was “the one,” despite not being able to pinpoint just what it was about Ellen that made her pass up six other candidates who interviewed for the same position.
“Even though she didn’t meet the requirements of the family nurse practitioner posting, I knew there was something about her. We changed the position so we could hire her because we knew she would fit into our family. And she did.
“We tease that stress was to her like water off a duck’s back,” Hedberg says. “She was like our pace car in a NASCAR race. Everyone just slid in behind her and followed the smooth path she created.
“Ellen wanted to make those connections. She wanted to build those intimate, caring relationships. She helped beyond a short exchange in the exam room. She understood that we are way more than a place where women come to deliver babies,” says Hedberg of the community-based, non-profit women’s medical center.
Adored by her clients, Ellen is not remembered simply by name or because she worked at Lisa Ross, but because of “the way she made every client feel.”
“...in all the ways you can, in all the places you can...”
With a cantaloupe-sized tumor growing down his nose and in the roof of his mouth, Atiliano Jones, then 15, came out of hiding in his Belize home because he knew Ellen cared. The compassion he sensed was more important than what she knew about the benign, yet aggressive, vascular head and neck tumor.
The rare condition of juvenile naso-pharyngeal angiofibroma (JNA) could kill the teenager. Boldly determined, Ellen wouldn’t let it. She banded with her best friend, Amy Cranfield Mitchell (Knoxville ’08), a UT nursing alumna, and palliative care nurse and former UT nursing clinical instructor Mary Sowell on the 2007 volunteer mission trip turned quest for a cure.
"The moment we walked in, the family welcomed us into their home," says Mitchell of the fateful visit that nearly didn’t happen because of unanswered knocks on the door. The door was finally opened by a toddler. "They brought us into a circle, and we held hands and they prayed, powerfully, in Spanish.
“We may not have understood what they were saying,” says Mitchell, an only child, who considered Ellen “my chosen sibling, my Bobbsey twin,” “but we knew this was a very special moment that would change our lives.
“It affirmed what we were called to do.”
The trio’s tenacity landed Jones in Tennessee and, ultimately, Boston for life-saving care and treatment of the mass.
“He lived,” says Mitchell, “because we cared.”
Ellen didn’t need to know you to care.
“She barely knew me, and we seemed like an unlikely pair to become friends,” says Kacey McGlothlan, who met Ellen while working on 3-East, the baby/mother floor of UT Medical Center. “I was about five years older than her. I had two sons. I was still working and going to school.
“She opened my eyes to life. I finished my bachelor’s and master’s in nursing because she pushed me. She knew what I needed when I didn’t know what I needed. She wouldn’t let me quit, and even at my worst, she never judged me.”
A life-giver who “saw you,” Ellen wrote faithfully to her soon-to-be husband, Ryan Sherrill, for seven months while he was stationed with the Marines in Afghanistan. He proposed at Biltmore Estate in 2009. A year later, they were married on a hot August Saturday in Knoxville at Bleak House.
“I knew then the amazing mother Ellen would someday be,” says Sherrill. “We would have hypothetical conversations about the family we would have someday. We thought we might have two or three kids.
“The one (Molly) we’ve been blessed with is who I continue to live for. That’s what Ellen would have wanted.”
“...at all the times you can, to all the people you can,...”
Molly has brown hair and eyes and a sweet smile, just like her mother, who she will never know.
“But she’ll know all about her,” says Ellen’s mother, Connie Bradshaw, through sorrowful tears.
“She’ll know how badly she was wanted,” says Herb Bradshaw, Ellen’s father. “She knew her and named her long before she was formed.”
Trey adds, “She’ll know how strong she was, how proud of her she was. She’ll know how deeply she loved her and so, so many others.”
Jill Lancaster never knew Ellen either. But Ellen’s legacy gave flight to Lancaster’s dream of becoming a nurse when she was named the inaugural recipient of the Melissa Ellen Bradshaw Sherrill Endowed Scholarship. In pursuit of a similar dream, Lancaster, who graduated in May 2014, says she too wants to make a difference in the world, “however small it may be, by helping other people.”
“Our prayer,” says Connie, is that one day, Molly, standing in her mother’s love, “will understand Ellen’s nurse’s heart” as she presents the scholarship to one aspiring nursing student after another.
“She lives within each of us. She’s still changing and impacting one life at a time.”
“...as long as ever you can.”