EVMS Pulse
  |    14.2 

Healing hands

By

Head shot of Danielle in front of a window.

When Darlene Pizarro was pregnant with her daughter Daniella, she had a recurring dream: Her baby’s hands were glowing.

“My mom would wake up my dad and say, ‘What do you think it means?’” says Daniella Pizarro, MPA Class of 2023. “Eventually, they settled on the idea that I had healing hands.”

The story of her mother’s visions — and her father’s faith in his daughter’s gifts — has become a central and poignant narrative for the Pizarro family. When Ms. Pizarro was in high school, her father, Daniel, became sick. Each day after school, Ms. Pizarro kept a journal of her father’s symptoms and made his favorite ham-and- cheese sandwiches. When Ms. Pizarro was 16, her father died on Christmas Day.

“It was a very hard time for our family, but one of the people who helped us the most was the PA who cared for my father,” says Ms. Pizarro. “Even after my father passed away, she would call every few months and check in on us and tell us what a special man he had been. That meant so much.”

Ms. Pizarro hopes to follow in that provider’s footsteps. The recipient of the 2021 Thomas M. and Angela Taylor Health Professions Scholarship, Ms. Pizarro started her healthcare career in April 2020 as an emergency room technician, working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic, at Chesapeake Regional Hospital. The Virginia Beach native applied to only one PA program because she felt in her heart that EVMS was the perfect place to pursue her dream of providing longer term, compassionate care to patients and their families.

Earning the scholarship, which covers two years’ tuition, was a blessing, she says. “To be able to study and focus on becoming the best PA I can be without the worry of debt hanging over my head is such a relief,” Ms. Pizarro says. “I feel like I am on the path I’m meant to be on and that my dad is looking down at me and smiling, telling me to keep going.”

As President of PA Students for Inclusion and Diversity, a student group founded in 2021, Ms. Pizarro also is passionate about diversifying the profession.

“Growing up in a Puerto Rican and Black household, I was bilingual from the moment I could say words,” says Ms. Pizarro. “The importance of being culturally aware and knowledgeable was taught to me at a young age as I navigated through the mixing pot of my bicultural family’s practices and experiences.”

Ms. Pizarro saw the dehumanizing implications of cultural and language barriers firsthand when her own grandmother struggled with late-stage dementia.

“She had forgotten the entire English language and could speak only her native tongue, Spanish,” Ms. Pizarro explains. “I would accompany her to her doctor’s appointments and notice the fear in her eyes as she felt unheard and misunderstood. That’s when I realized the impact of the lack of inclusivity and diversity in healthcare. There were not many providers who looked like us to advocate for us.”

Currently, an estimated 3% of U.S. physician assistants are Black, and only 6% are Hispanic. Those are statistics Ms. Pizarro hopes to change.

“This is one of the driving forces of why I am pursuing medicine,” she says. “Patients need and deserve more providers who look like them. America is full of people of different backgrounds and cultures, and I wholeheartedly believe that our healthcare system should mirror that.”

Read more magazine stories from issue 14.2 or read stories from past issues.