Carolyn Neff & Anne Marie Stein

It’s not unusual for career choices to run in families.

Carolyn Neff, an RN whose daughter is also an RN, and this in itself isn’t unusual. However, this mother and daughter do more than share the same profession. They work together — in the same hospital, on the same unit.

Neff and her daughter, Anne Marie Stein, are both nurses at the Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Overland Park Regional Medical Center.

“The neonatal intensive care unit is its own very specialized world,” Neff said. “It’s challenging and also heartwarming to treat the very critically ill baby through to discharge. I learn something new every day.”

That passion for nursing was contagious.

“I love learning something new every day,” Stein said. “One of the things my mom always said was that she learned something new every day as a nurse.”

Before working in the Overland Park Regional Medical Center NICU, Stein said she tried out a few different units before working in the NICU.

“After I graduated nursing school, my mom always said, ‘You need to come work with me,’“ Stein said.

She lived in New York after graduating nursing school, working both in a pediatric intensive care unit and a burn intensive care unit. After her first child was both, she and her husband decided to move to Kansas City.

“My mom got her wish,” Stein said. “I am able to work side by side with mom doing something we both are passionate about. I love teaching parents how to give a bath or how to feed their premature infant. I especially love seeing a 23-week infant grow to full term and go home to live a happy life with their parents.”

“It’s fun working my daughter,” Neff said. “We have gotten to know each other as co-workers and friends.”

For Stein, her mother is much more than a nurse, co-worker and friend.

“Not everyone gets to work with their childhood idol and I do,” said Stein.