Love Across the Generations: Graduate celebrates with grandparents who raised her, develops passion for nursing after serving as their caretaker

Many Liberty University graduates are celebrating their accomplishments with family members this week as in-person degree ceremonies take place on campus. But for one nursing graduate, sharing the milestone with her grandparents is extra special.

Nursing graduate Adrianna Eagle was raised by her grandparents, Carol and Stan, since she was 6 months old. They formally adopted her at age 14. The lessons they taught her in childhood are invaluable, but it’s what she’s learned since the age of 15, when Eagle became the caretaker for her grandfather — a double amputee below the knee with additional health issues — and her grandmother that influenced her the most. Through caring for them, her desire to serve others as a Christian in the nursing field led her to Liberty’s School of Nursing.

Eagle grew up in Madison Heights, Va., just north of Lynchburg, with the unique distinction of having her grandparents take on a dual role as parents. She laughed when explaining that her grandparents found a balance between setting proper childhood boundaries while still finding ways to treat her as their granddaughter.

“It was always different; there were things that I was allowed to do that my friends weren’t allowed to do, and then while they would discipline me, they were still my grandparents so they wanted to spoil me, too,” Eagle said.

Being raised by parents two generations older, Eagle said she found herself being the one to take care of those who had cared for her, at a much earlier time in her life.

“Most people don’t really take care of their parents until they (the child) are in middle age, but as someone who had grandparents for parents, their health was obviously declining when I was growing up,” she said.

Eagle managed to simultaneously care for her grandparents and work a nearly full-time job in retail while pursuing her BSN in a program that requires clinical hours and other time-consuming practices. She said she was able to accomplish it all through prioritizing her time and sometimes sacrificing the social element of college life.

“I’m a big believer in the idea that there’s no such thing as not having time for something, it’s that you don’t prioritize it. It has taken so much prioritizing my time and understanding that there are going to be moments when my family has to come before school and I need to plan my studying to make it work. I have lost a large social component of college that a lot of people get, and I regret that in some ways, but I’ve also been able to maintain it for people I wanted to intentionally spend time with.”

Her packed routine was challenged in her final semester this spring when her grandfather entered the ICU with high ammonia levels after liver failure as a diabetic, eventually spending two weeks in the hospital and two weeks in rehab. Eagle had a clinical scheduled on the day that her grandfather first entered the ICU, and she said that her professors were understanding throughout the process of visiting him during her final load of courses.

“I was jumping back and forth between the hospital with him and Nana and school, and a lot of my clinical faculty were so gracious with giving me extensions allowing me to be present with my family, even when I was finishing up my degree,” she said.

Her grandfather is now home and getting accustomed to a new set of prosthetic legs with plans to walk Eagle down the aisle at her wedding next month.

Eagle will begin her nursing career in the cardiac intermediate care center at Centra this August, serving in the same local hospital where she and her family have been patients over the years. The staff there have been great examples to her of the care and compassion nurses should display. In middle school, Eagle experienced health issues of her own and underwent two brain surgeries. She remembers being cared for by Liberty graduate Karen Lambert (’12, ’14) and current adjunct professor Patricia “Pachi” Carvalho. Seven years later, Carvalho was Eagle’s preceptor in clinicals and has continued to pour into her.

“There was one point where I was super sick since I was on antibiotic therapy for an infection and (Lambert) literally sat on the floor with me,” Eagle recalled. “(Carvalho) took time to braid my hair after brain surgery when no one else would really touch my surgical site, and she spent a lot of time pouring into both me and my family. I said that I was going to do that for someone else someday.”

“The nurses who have taken care of me and my family in the hospital are now the ones teaching me how to be a nurse like them, so that has been something really special about staying local for school,” she added.

Eagle said Liberty was an obvious choice for her after visiting the campus many times growing up nearby, but she was especially drawn to its mission of Training Champions for Christ and believed in the value of a Christian education.

“I think there is such a place for a biblical worldview in academia, and I wanted to continue that for nursing school,” she said. “I know that I’m going to be a better nurse having gone to a Christian university and having a biblical worldview intertwined with my practice. It’s easy as a nurse to get distracted by the diagnoses and what’s going on, but Christians are told to approach everyone as a person and a soul and someone created by God, so we treat them as such.”