For a moment, Jessie McNally stood stunned, hands covering her face.

Seated in front of the veteran Freeman RN were the smiling parents of four infants McNally had cared for at the Freeman Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. 

McNally had been told to visit the Freeman West conference rooms to help collect maternal supplies from the supply closet. But that was just a ruse. In reality, McNally was the September DAISY Award winner. The DAISY Award is an international program recognizing the daily miracles nurses perform with their hospitalized patients.

The reason the families and their children were present at Freeman West had everything to do with McNally’s extraordinary compassion and nursing skills. It was these parents, and other families, who had collectively nominated McNally for the DAISY.

“It took a while to register what was happening,” McNally said. “When I realized they were all babies I had cared for, I immediately started to get emotional and cry. I was so excited to see how big my sweet babies had gotten.”

McNally’s win is a unique one. Since DAISY’s inception at Freeman in 2017, she received the most total nominations, nine, that any Freeman nurse has received over a 16-month period.

After the initial shock wore off, McNally went to each family to hug them, before rocking each baby in her arms. By the end of the celebration, while posing for pictures and holding each baby, she joked that her arms were getting tired.

The DAISY win and the record number of nominations “means the whole world to me,” McNally said. “It is an incredible honor to get to do what I do for a living and each one of these families that I have cared for have become like family to me. The fact that they took the time out of their days to even nominate me is incredible. The fact that each one of these families took time off in the middle of a Monday afternoon to come celebrate with me. It’s still bringing tears to my eyes.”

Here are a few nomination excerpts from families whose child was personally cared for by McNally:

* “As Jessie held my wife and said goodbye at discharge, she gently told our baby girl, ‘You’re gonna change the world.’ My wife broke down into happy, emotional, overwhelmed tears. To be able to move someone I love so deeply in the way Jessie did, that goes far beyond what any award can capture.”

* “I would consider her family, and an honorary aunt of our son.”

* “She loves our babies like her own.”

* “She made a scary, unsure time feel not so scary. She was a light in our dark time.”

McNally caregiving skills were honed at a young age, when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. At the age of 9, she took care of her ailing mother. She cooked, cleaned, gave her mother backrubs, and watched her lose 45 pounds in a matter of months. After 12 months, her mother passed away.

“When friends would spend the night, I still put her first and made sure my friends understood that she took priority over playtime,” McNally said. “I think caring for my own caregiver at such a young age shaped who I am today.”

She seriously considered joining the Police Academy to eventually become a police detective, in hopes of using her caregiving skills to help traumatized victims. But she switched gears toward nursing instead, instinctively embracing what she’d done so well as a 9-year-old inside the family home with her ailing mother.

She joined Freeman Health System in 2020, weathering through the traumatic COVID months. She graduated nursing school a year later. Since then, she has served as an RN inside the NICU for the past three years and seven months. And she’s savoring every moment.

“The day I received my DAISY award was the first day my dad started chemo and radiation treatment for oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma,” she said. “It was a very sad day, and I spent most of the day hiding in my room and crying. I am a firm believer in God's timing because I really needed a pick me up that day and He sure delivered!”

Receiving the DAISY honor, McNally continued, “is an immense honor and a huge blessing. It tells me that I am exactly where I am meant to be.”