A Gift Passed on from Mother to Daughter

When father and mother are both nurses, a career in the health care industry can be inevitable.

At least it was for Christine Castillo-Sainz, a native Houstonian who graduated from Houston Independent School District’s High School for the Health Professions before attending college.

"From the time I was a little girl, I had always pictured myself working in the medical community," Sainz said. "I don’t really know any other lifestyle, and since my father and my mother were nurses, we socialized with many people in the field. This is what I wanted to do, care for people," she said.

But the greatest influence on her life was her mother, Pilar Castillo, a registered nurse at The Methodist Hospital in Houston who founded the Houston Community College System Surgical Technology Program in 1972, a year-long program she chaired until her death in 1991.

Sainz remembers her mother’s excitement about the new challenge at HCC. "My mother was very active in her professional group and, at some points in her career, met resistance. She didn’t tell us about it – we were too young to understand – but she often heard, ‘You’re a Hispanic woman and this isn’t your place.’"

As an elementary-age girl, Sainz remembered the excitement of going to her mother’s new office, scooting under her desk and drawing cartoons on the bottom of the drawer. She also remembers meeting the HCC faculty members who had offices adjacent to her mother’s.

After high school, the young daughter attended St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, then in 1986 completed a degree in psychology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. From there, she enrolled in HCC’s two-year registered nursing program, graduating in 1988.

"The whole time I was in nursing, I worked in the operating room at Methodist and, after I graduated, went on its staff as an operating room nurse," she said.

After leaving Methodist, she assumed a position with a medical case management company as a bilingual case manager, a job she enjoyed and one that required all of her nursing skills. "I was happy there," Sainz recalled. "I thought I had found my niche."

In December 1998, Sainz’s grandmother died after a long illness and her brother notified former HCC colleagues of her death. During one of these calls, he learned that his mother’s former position as chair of the program was open. He passed the information on to his sister.

"I definitely wasn’t looking for a job," Sainz recalled, "but when I heard about the vacancy, I hoped they would go on and fill it quickly. I hoped that they wouldn’t close the program, because my mother had put a lot of time, a lot of energy, but mainly a lot of heart, into developing and expanding the program. I didn’t want it to go away. I had seen the results of the program and believed it was something the medical community would continue to need," she said.

Casting away thoughts about the program until after Christmas that year, Sainz decided to research the position. She made a call to the community college and, after interviews, was offered the opportunity to take over some of the teaching duties in the Surgical Technology Program. It was a gamble for both parties, but Sainz decided to quit her job, turn in her company car and start teaching. She was told there were no guarantees, but she chose to go forward and take on the program her mother started.

"If it is meant to be, it is meant to be. If not, move on," she thought.

Once at HCC, she found herself occupying the same office her mother had once used. And, although fairly sure the desk was the same as her mother’s, Sainz pulled out the middle drawer and looked at the bottom. Sure enough, there were the cartoons she had scrawled almost 20 years earlier.

Six months later, Sainz took charge as chair of the program her mother created almost three decades earlier.

The program, for students seeking careers as surgical technologists, is one of 17 allied health programs based in the five-story John B. Coleman, M.D. Health Science Center, which opened in the fall of 1999. Of the 29 students graduating last August, 98 percent are applying their skills as surgical technologists.

---

©2006 Texas Medical Center

---

E-Mail: tmcinfo@texmedctr.tmc.edu
URL: http://www.tmc.edu/tmcnews/03_15_02/page_08.html