Hometown Hero - Carol Hoff

This week’s Hometown Hero is Carol Hoff of Onalaska. This registered nurse recently retired from 43 years of working in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at Mayo Clinic Health system – La Crosse.

You could say that nursing is in Carol’s blood. Her mother had a background in nursing and she and her sister both went to nurses training after helping their mother care for a brother with muscular dystrophy. Carol graduated from St. Francis School of Nursing in La Crosse and was in one of the last classes before the school closed.

For all 43 years of her career, Carol worked at the NICU at Mayo Clinic’s Franciscan Healthcare in La Crosse. The doctors and nurses in this highly specialized field deal with the day to day challenges of caring for newborns with complex and challenging medical conditions, often as a result of their premature birth.

Carol says that the hardest part of her job was taking care of the babies that she knew would never get better and helping their parents cope with that realization. When she first started working, the NICU was only able to help babies born at 34 weeks and if the baby needed a ventilator, a nurse had to stand by their bed and hand-pump it for hours. With new baby ventilators and other technologies, the Mayo Clinic NICU can treat babies born at 23 weeks. The most rewarding part? Seeing healthy babies go home with their happy parents.

After retiring on her birthday, February 25th, Carol says she is enjoying her retirement, especially not getting up at 5 am every day. Her grandchildren got a kick out of seeing her old nursing school graduation photo in the newspaper. She is also an avid quilter.

Congratulations to you, Carol! Keep up the good work and continue to be a Hometown Hero.

Hometown Hero is a weekly feature put together by Rep. Steve Doyle (D-Onalaska). If you have any suggestions of a Hometown Hero, send a short description of why you think this person should be a Hometown Hero and contact information of both you and the nominee to rep.doyle@legis.wisconsin.gov.