Student: Michaela Davenport

Michaela Davenport said her path to East Carolina University and the College of Nursing wasn’t easy, or direct, but she has no doubt it was the right choice.

ECU CRNA student Michaela Davenport has found new levels of self-confidence and ways to serve her patients through her education and clinical experiences.

Davenport is from Pea Ridge, a small community on the Albermarle sound about halfway to the Outer Banks from Greenville. The town, near where her family has lived for many generations, doesn’t have a stop light or a gas station. She was born in Chowan County Hospital and raised in the same house until she went to college.

To say she’s from eastern North Carolina is an understatement.

Her parents both worked multiple jobs to raise her and her older brother. They never wanted for anything, but she didn’t realize at the time the lengths her parents went to give them a launching pad.

“When I went to college, and then when I started working myself, I actually found out how much my mom and dad sacrificed for us,” Davenport said.

Her grandparents lived next door. They grew up in the wake of the Great Depression and made education a priority — her grandfather was a pastor, and her grandmother was a hairdresser. They insisted on picking Davenport and her brother up after school to make sure homework was done and dinner was on the table until their parents arrived home.

Hard work was a lesson she learned early; one that would serve her well.

Charting Her Educational Path

If your high school was small, Davenport’s was smaller. And it probably was much more challenged to provide educational resources for students who live in a chronically disadvantaged corner of the state.

“We had 29 people in my graduating class. If you wanted to do anything, you could do it, so I played softball and volleyball,” Davenport said. “I played one season of basketball because the girls on the team got in a fight, and they all got suspended. Because I was one of the taller females in the school, I was asked to play. I went to practice on a Friday and started in the game on Saturday. I didn’t even know where to stand.”

Michaela Davenport poses with fellow students and faculty members from ECU’s CRNA program.

She got straight A’s all the way through high school, but said she never realized how challenged the school system was and how disadvantaged that made her heading into college.

Davenport knew she wanted to do something in health care — being a flight nurse, or in the neonatal intensive care unit — something that gets the adrenaline flowing. A scholarship to UNC Wilmington’s School of Nursing, and help from her parents, would eventually allow her to enter the workforce debt free.

But school was challenging, especially chemistry, so she signed up for every tutoring opportunity she could find and ultimately was accepted into the nursing program. The school sets students up to sit for the certified nursing assistant test in the first year, which she took, giving her an opportunity to work weekends and school breaks in Greenville, closer to home.

And closer to “a boy from back home.” That boy would soon become the husband who has waited patiently while Davenport has spent countless weekends at the library studying, and who will cheer the loudest for her at graduation.

Life, and a New Chapter

An unfortunate mentor in the emergency department during a nursing school clinical rotation turned her off to the ED, and she said she preferred working with adults (this will be important later), so that funneled her to a position in the medical ICU at ECU Health Medical Center after graduation.

Pea Ridge native Michaela Davenport transitioned from a rural school system to tackle one of the most demanding aspects of the nursing profession.

Six years passed quickly, but she felt complacency setting in and wanted to push back. One of her nurse managers told her she’d do well in a nursing leadership role and the nurse practitioner track was an option, but she couldn’t see herself in either years down the road.

“Once, I saw a CRNA place a cricothyrotomy in a patient. It was the most high-stress situation, and they were so calm. I thought, ‘They’re the coolest people I’ve ever seen in my life,’” Davenport remembered.

She mentioned the idea to a supervisor but was told she was too outgoing, and Davenport thought, ‘Maybe she knows what she’s talking about,’ but she persisted, got an opportunity to shadow a CRNA at the hospital, and was hooked.

After breezing through the prerequisite tests, she was accepted into East Carolina University’s Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist program in late 2022 and started with online classes in January 2023. The program is front loaded, meaning the doctor of nursing practice coursework is completed first.

Students spend the second year at the Brody School of Medicine taking anatomy, physiology and pharmacology courses alongside second-year medical students, which Davenport feels is a strength of the program.

“It creates this interdisciplinary environment. When I was working as a nurse, some of the providers said they have a lot of respect for the CRNAs because they take the same classes as the medical students, which instills respect. We’ve been through the same thing as them,” she said.

Davenport said her time in the CRNA program has helped build confidence and find ways to believe in herself. CRNAs get a few precious minutes to connect with their patients before putting them under, so having years of experience at the bedside before entering the program has helped her to remember that she is capable, despite embarking on a demanding path.

“I worked at the bedside for six years. I trained new grad nurses, I trained travel nurses, I trained nurses to dialysis. I went from being the expert to realizing that I knew nothing about anesthesia at the beginning of the program, and that’s hard. It’s a reality check,” Davenport said.

One of the things that she had to learn quickly was the disparity in the way anesthesia affects adults and children, and it’s not just the way medicines work on the body. Building trust with kids is harder than adults, who can be “schmoozed.”

Working with kids is more intentional and creative, Davenport said.

“One time we played a game with a kid, to see how fast we could get to the operating room to get on the bed. We were running to get back there and the kid thought it was the greatest thing ever. I was out of breath and he was out of breath, but it was fun,” Davenport said. “It’s cool to see how much of a difference you can make for somebody’s overall experience.”

Davenport is looking forward to the final phase of her training, the clinical rotations that will transition the book learning and classroom practice into direct patient care before graduation in spring 2026.