Nursing is a second, or even a third career for Deborah Masullo, but while she’s been a registered nurse for only seven years, her time in medicine goes back to 1979.
Following completion of a regional occupational program in Southern California, she gained experience as an emergency medical technician, and in urgent care, physical therapy, internal medicine, OBGYN, and natural medicine.
It wasn’t until years later — after a second marriage and all of her kids had become adults — that she became a registered nurse. She started a nursing program at Golden West Community College in Huntington Beach and finished at Cuesta College in San Luis Obispo after moving from Orange County to Grover Beach to take care of her mother, who suffered from lung cancer.
In her elementary school years, Stephanie Vega tagged along with her mother on the weekends to her hospital administration job in Glendale. That was Vega’s first exposure to the medical field. Vega’s true inspiration for her nursing career came as a young teenager, she just didn’t quite know it at the time.
Masullo, 56, traces her interest in medicine to childhood. She was born in California, moved to Massachusetts as an infant, then moved back to Orange County when she was 10 years old.
As a child Masullo experienced a life-threatening bout of Guillian-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder in which the body’s immune system attacks the nerves. The syndrome developed, she said, as a reaction to a flu shot. The condition almost paralyzed her as a teenager — she lost control of her breathing, and she spent 10 months in a children’s hospital in Downey where she celebrated her 14th birthday. Her experience came at a time when children still were getting polio, and she said she vividly remembers the iron lungs.
Masullo now works among a dedicated team of nurses in the telemetry unit at Marian Regional Medical Center.
She has experienced the death of a patient at least 30 times in the last six years, she said, but two stand out.
One patient, she recalls, knew he was going to die and refused to don a bilevel positive airway pressure device to help him breathe. Masullo remembered the patient motioning “I love you” in sign language to his wife, then giving her a kiss before he died. The family was so touched by Masullo’s presence that they reach out to her each March on the anniversary of his death, she said.
Masullo also treated Marilyn Pharis, who died in August 2015 from a blood clot eight days after being severely beaten during a robbery at her Santa Maria home.
For some families, nursing goes back generations. In others, the inspiration comes at a young age as a result of a sick family member. It’s no different for Mae Lagua, who found her calling because of her mother, who has been a nurse for three decades and is now a shift coordinator at Marian Extended Care. At 30 years old, Lagua has been a registered nurse for two years and was a licensed vocational nurse (LVN) for eight years before that. She’s originally from Santa Maria. In fact, she was born at Marian Regional Medical Center, where she works now.