For Neysa Ernst, May 26 was just like any other day. But as she headed for the McElderry Garage at the end of her workday, she saw a group of young teens at a Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center security desk crying. Ernst’s nursing instinct kicked in. She walked over and said to them, “Tell me the whole story.” What came afterward made her glad she stopped.

As the nurse manager for the endoscopy unit in the Sheikh Zayed Tower, Ernst manages almost 80 nurses, clinical techs, transporters and others employees who care for inpatient and outpatient adults with either a pulmonary or gastrointestinal need for an endoscopy procedure.

It is not unusual for her to stop and ask visitors if they need help finding something, she says, but on this particular day she knew this was something more. The girls shared that they had driven from Virginia to have their blood drawn in an attempt to see if they were a bone marrow match for their critically ill father. But they were too late — Express Testing had just closed for the day.

Ernst led the girls to the waiting room of the pediatric emergency department and explained the situation to the charge nurse who responded, “Of course we’ll figure this out.”

“We’re a community, and there were a lot of people who pulled together to help with this. If those girls went home without having their labs done, that was going to impact their whole experience,” Ernst says. “This situation was not a problem. This was an opportunity for us to be creative and figure out how we could solve it.”

After the girls had their blood drawn, Ernst walked them back to the outpatient center. When they were about to part ways, the youngest girl looked up at her and said, “You’re the nicest person I’ve ever met. Did you have time to do this tonight?” Ernst thought about her “dopey” cat and husband waiting at home, but she knew that this time, she had a good excuse for being late.

“As a nurse we talk about empathy all the time,” she says. “We all get busy, but shouldn’t we all stop more often and ask our colleagues, friends and others, ‘What do you need?’ or, ‘How can I help?’”