Teachers After 4:10 — Mrs. Kathryn Treviño

When kids are little, they all say that they want to be doctors, astronauts, or the president — with few following through with their young aspirations. But Mrs. Kathryn Treviño, who teaches classes in the Health Sciences department of the Career and Technical Education (CTE) academy, lived on to achieve her childhood dreams.

From the time she was a little girl, Mrs. Treviño knew exactly what she wanted to do when she was an adult.

“When I was growing up, my grandmother asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I said, ‘Well, I either want to be a nurse, a teacher, or a mom’,” Mrs. Treviño said. “So she made me this shirt that said in paint: ‘Will I be: a nurse, a teacher, a mom, or all three?’, and I ended up being all three.”

After graduating from high school, Mrs. Treviño attended ACC then UT, where she completed nursing school and earned her Bachelor’s Degree of Science in Nursing.

“In nursing school, you do a clinical hands-on program: you go into the hospital and work with patients, not specifying in one area, but generalizing,” Mrs. Treviño said. “Then when you get out of nursing school, whatever job you get, there is an orientation where they really teach you about the population you’ll be working with and the specifics on that floor.”

Mrs. Treviño originally worked with newborns in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), then continued her focus on the maternal/child population after that.

“I moved to other things because the hospital schedule was really hard to work with my family at that time,” Mrs. Treviño said. “As a nurse I could work one day in the NICU, then the next day apply to work on a cardiology floor. If they hired me, they would train me to work cardiology patients — it’s very flexible.”

Though she had no specialization, Mrs. Treviño loved caring for newborns.

“I focused on the maternal child population — I really like working with newborn babies, pregnant women, families and children,” Mrs. Treviño said. “Being able to be with a family when a baby is born is absolutely amazing; I feel it’s a privilege to be there with them during special times like that, and being able to educate them — I love to educate families on how to bond with their baby and how to take care of their baby.”

The workers in the NICU aid in deliveries that may be dangerous to the mother or newborn.

“In the NICU, the staff helps with high risk deliveries — so if there was a baby that was already having problems during the pregnancy, or was going to be delivered prematurely, or whose heart rate was going down during labor, they would say the baby is stressed and would want a neonatologist to be in there,” Mrs. Treviño said. “They were there to make sure everything was going smoothly — to help if any problems were to arise, or if there were multiple babies.”

Though it seems like an always joyful job, sometimes there are heartbreaking situations.

“Once when I was working in the NICU on orientation, there was a call with a mother who was pregnant with twins,” Mrs. Treviño said. “One of the twins was no longer alive, so they needed to deliver the other baby, but the birth was early on, so they needed to take that baby directly to the NICU.“He stayed there for several months, and finally was discharged and did well — but it was really sad, because here you have a mother who is expecting to have two babies, and one baby is not living and one baby is. It can be really hard working with the family, to be able to acknowledge the grief they’re going through — but they are also scared for their baby now that’s born, wondering if it’s going to be okay.”

Those who wish to work in the Maternity Ward need to realize what their job will really entail.

“If you say, ‘Oh, I want to work with pregnant women and with people having babies, that will be so much fun!’, the thing is that when it’s happy, it’s really happy — but when it’s sad, it can be really sad,” Mrs. Treviño said. “You have to be able to be there for the patients, not just saying to them, ‘Oh, it’ll be okay, it’ll be alright’, but being there with them, walking through the grief and the pain, and letting them know that you are there to help them out.”

After being a nurse for 16 years, Mrs. Treviño decided it was time to transition into teaching.

“Four years ago I said, ‘You know, I want to try teaching’, and this was perfect because you have to have some sort of license as a health care provider (such as a registered nurse or respiratory therapist) to work in the Career and Technology Education setting, so being a registered nurse qualified me,” Mrs. Treviño said. “Then, because I didn’t go to school to be a teacher, I had to get my teaching certificate, which allows me to teach.”

Here at Westwood, Mrs. Treviño offers a variety of courses for those who wish to work in the healthcare industry.

“I teach health science courses: Principles of Health Science, Medical Terminology, and Disaster Response,” Mrs. Treviño said. “Principles of Health Science teaches students about the different careers in health care, basic anatomy and physiology, pathology (which is the disease process of different systems), ethics, medical law — we kind of touch on everything. Medical Terminology is learning all the different Latin and Greek derivatives so you can break apart medical words and understand what they’re saying. Disaster Response is the newest course to Westwood in our academy, and we talk about how to prepare for disasters, how to triage patients and victims, how to be helpful in a disaster situation — disasters anywhere from someone gets hurt in a community setting to a tornado, flood, anything that could happen. It’s training them to be knowledgeable volunteers in an emergency situation”

Beyond that, other teachers in the CTE academy teach higher level health science courses for the juniors and seniors.

“There are two classes above me: Mr. Gaines’ class for juniors teaches them more advanced medical knowledge, then as a senior students have the opportunity to do an internship of their choosing, and then they also intern at a pharmacy,” Mrs. Treviño said. “We teach anyone who is interested in being in the health career: respiratory therapist, physical therapist, athletic trainer, nutritionist, nurses, doctors, all kinds of stuff.”

She enjoys her classes, and hopes to continue teaching.

“This works very well with my family — I hope to do this until they’re out of school, which my youngest is two, so it’s going to be a while!” Mrs. Treviño said. “And I love Westwood — it’s my community school, so that works out well.”

Mrs. Treviño believes that one of the most important things in healthcare is working as a team.

“A lot of times when we do teamwork activities in our class, people kind of sigh and are frustrated because they think, ‘This is so boring, this is stuff I know’,” Mrs. Treviño said. “But if you’ve ever been in an operating room and people don’t work together, it can be trouble really fast. If you can’t work and talk with each other, even if you don’t like that person, continue to work with them. If you don’t then you’re going to have a hard time in health care and in life.”

To work with patients and other medical staff, it is vital that you conduct yourself in a professional manner — you never know when you might regret it.

“You have to be able to be a people person — I always say that in high school, when people say, ‘Oh, I don’t like this person,’ you never know if that person is going to be your boss in the future,” Mrs. Treviño said. “People always say no, but you just don’t know — so don’t say anything or do anything that you might regret.”