Logan Riesterer is a nurse at Chicago’s Ascension Saint Mary Hospital. But Riesterer’s first day on the job was hardly her first time at the medical center. Riesterer was abandoned in the hospital’s chapel when she was just a baby.
Nestor Hermogino was a secretary in the hospital’s ICU when the infant was dropped off back in the 1990s. It was there, in the hospital’s chapel where Hermogino went to pray before each shift, that the secretary discovered a baby wrapped in a blanket. Not long after, Ivorye and Donald Riesterer stepped in to adopt the baby.
“I fell in love with that baby,” Ivorye Riesterer told Scrubs Magazine. “I didn’t even know her. And I always wanted a daughter.”
According to the Logan Riesterer, life has been pretty great in the years since.
“Even though we didn’t know who my birth family was, I’ve always had an amazing, amazing family and amazing parents,” she said. “I had a happy childhood. They’ve always supported me in making sure I knew where I came from. I knew my story.”
Through her family’s loving approach to education, Logan discovered a love for the medical sciences.
“I always wanted to be in the medical field,” Logan Riesterer said. “This was actually my very first nursing job. (I) actually came my first day of orientation into the chapel and I walked in and felt like I had always been here, like I’d seen it before. This wave of familiarity came over me. It felt like home in a way.”
That feeling of being at home only increased when Riesterer learned she was working just two floors above Hermogino, the man who discovered her all those years ago.
“When I first met Nestor, I couldn’t believe it,” Logan Riesterer said. “This is where I’m starting out my nursing career, something I’ve wanted to do for years and years and years. And it’s all kind of coming full circle and now I’m here. How amazing is that, that somebody who comes here (to the chapel) every day, the nicest man in the world, he is the one that found me here?”
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