Spotlight on Cherie Fingerle, RN
“I was born to be a caregiver,” says Cherie Fingerle, RN.
Fingerle didn’t always want to be a nurse, but decided to pursue it after taking a career assessment in high school. The assessment suggested she look into social work or nursing. “I thought, a nurse makes people feel better and puts Band-Aids on people. All right, I’ll do that!”
The career assessment was clearly accurate -- Fingerle has worked at Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital since 1986.
Working in the Emergency Department, Fingerle works hard to make patients’ experiences in the hospital a little easier. “I love patients,” she says. “I love learning what makes them tick. We are there with them on what could be their worst day, and we want to do anything we can to make it better for them. For me, it’s about making them feel better, safe and more secure.”
Fingerle says that even after all these years, the hospital feels like a tight-knit community. “Our coworkers are family,” she says. “We’ve all grown up together. Living in the community is great. We take care of our friends, family, and neighbors. It’s a great sense of community.”
And the location of SBELIH cannot be understated. “In the 1980s, we saved people using thrombolytics who would be dead if they had to go all the way from here to Riverhead,” Fingerle says. “The next nearest hospital is at least a half-hour away, and that’s on a good day without traffic.”
Fingerle believes that the integration with Stony Brook Medicine has led to great strides in education for nurses, and that having the educational resources of Stony Brook has made the hospital a better place.
