By Amy White
The Texas Catholic
The idea of becoming a nurse has been in Sharon Robinson’s head almost her whole life. The St. Ann Catholic Church parishioner can recall those early days, sitting next to her mother and watching a medical show; her mother would see a nurse on screen and remark to her daughter, “You’re going to be a nurse.” Call it a mother’s intuition: She was right.
“The funny thing is,” Robinson said, “I kind of went the roundabout way.”
Before pursuing nursing, Robinson earned a degree in health education at the University of Wisconsin in 1985. As someone with an open, friendly personality and a love for health, the degree seemed to make sense; but the idea of running a hospital also appealed to her, so she pursued a degree in hospital administration from the University of Central Florida shortly after acquiring the first degree. Only after getting married in 1989, and realizing that her spouse’s career in the military would mean frequent moves, did Robinson decide to pursue a third degree — this time in nursing.
For nearly 30 years, Robinson has been a registered nurse and certified diabetes nurse educator. She has taught classes about meal plans, childbirth, CPR, postpartum, and a series of additional health topics. “I taught just about everything I could,” she said. “I got my fingers in everything at the hospital.”
Currently, Robinson volunteers much of her medical expertise to her community by teaching classes in her apartment about nutrition, self-care, and the right questions to ask doctors during appointments—all free of charge.
“I’ll take them to doctor’s appointments, and I’ll sit in with them; and I have the pertinent questions to ask the doctor to make sure they’re getting that specific care that they need,” Robinson said. “It’s just so rewarding to me that they look to me and they trust me.”
In her decades of health care service, the registered nurse said her favorite part of being a medical professional is being in a position to accompany people as they accomplish their health goals.
“You see that what you did made such an impact on them,” she said, “and so that’s the fulfilling part of it.”
Peru
For the first time in her life, during the St. Ann 2024 Peru Mission Trip last June, Robinson took her professional talents across the world as a medical missionary.
Each year, missionaries from St. Ann Catholic Church in Coppell partner with Santisimo Sacramento Parish in Piura, Peru, to bring their services to families in the pueblos surrounding Piura. The parish sits near a mission facility, where people from around the world travel to engage in service work. St. Ann sends missionaries to the site for two one-week missions every year.
“The first week we go to Peru is service work, and that would involve building bamboo houses, delivering food,” Vicky Pickard, an organizer of the Peru mission trip, explained, “and the second week, we take physicians, PAs, nurse practitioners out into the field and set up mobile clinics.”
During that second week, Robinson and the other missionaries took supplies from the mission facility, packed them into trucks, and went into the community each day to serve the local people. The St. Ann missionaries saw 850 patients during that mission trip.
“We didn’t know where we were going, and we didn’t know if we were going to have a roof over our heads, walls around us,” Robinson said, recalling how the medical missionaries would raise a curtain screen around the physicians at whatever location they landed during their mission in Peru. Robinson helped at the pharmacy table—filling prescriptions and dispersing them.
“We were kind of the pharmacists,” she said, “filling subscriptions from eight in the morning until five o’clock at night; and I mean, they were just piled up.”
Pickard, who also has a background in nursing, recalled Robinson’s zeal to serve and her enthusiasm about the mission’s programs.
“She really was interested in going down and doing the service work,” the mission organizer said, “and being able to use her background as a nurse to help the people in these poor communities that we serve down there.”
Honduras
This month, Robinson is once again putting her medical knowledge at the service of others, this time on the Diocese of Dallas Honduras Medical Mission trip, March 31 to April 4. Organized by the Dallas diocese’s office of Catholic Social Ministries, this year’s medical mission brings to Bonito Oriental, Honduras, 22 missionaries, including 13 medical and health professionals, three deacons, one religious sister, and five volunteers.
“We are able to provide basic medical and dental care to over 1,000 patients,” Juan Rendon, director of Catholic Social Ministries, said of the Honduras trip. “We have an amazing team of doctors and nurses who see this mission as a vocation… We stand together as missionaries of hope to bring the good news of salvation to the marginalized.”
Robinson, who learned of the Honduras medical mission trip through her involvement with the Peru medical mission trip, expressed joy at the prospect of once again utilizing her gifts to serve God’s people.
“I’ll go wherever they need me,” she said. “I just want the Lord to work through me, whatever I can do.”
Cutline for featured image: St. Ann Catholic Church parishioner Sharon Robinson, a registered nurse and certified diabetes nurse educator, is one of 22 missionaries serving on the Diocese of Dallas Honduras Medical Mission trip from March 31 to April 4. (AMY WHITE/The Texas Catholic)
