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Your Gifts At Work: MetroHealth Caregivers Inspire Hope
Made for the Mission: Your Generosity, Their Calling
When you give to MetroHealth, you give in support of high-quality, life-changing care for everyone.
You have heard stories of our incredible patients, individuals whose perseverance inspires hope every day.
Here, we are highlighting the MetroHealth staff members who make that perseverance and hope possible.
Who work the third shift to be there for our most vulnerable patients.
Who sit with them through screenings and offer a warm smile or supportive touch.
Who have found connection, purpose and passion in caring.
They are made for this mission.
Irina Tvardovskaya | Ralph Sonner | Shawnese Gordon | Christine Alexander-Rager, MD
Meet Irina Tvardovskaya
Julia had had an ear infection. With a prescription for antibiotics, she made a full recovery.
Irina said the experience with the interpreter helped her see what was possible if she could speak English.
Irina soon enrolled in a two-year English as a Second Language program at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C). When Irina had a firm grasp on the language, she left a grueling house-cleaning job to become an interpreter at MetroHealth. She loved the stability, place and purpose the job provided – but still, she wanted to do more.
Inspired by providers she saw every day, Irina was intrigued by the idea of radiology school. Her supervisor informed her that MetroHealth would pay for her schooling if she managed to work full-time while earning good grades. Together, they worked up a manageable plan that allowed Irina to enroll in classes during the day and work as an interpreter on second shift and weekends.
In 1999, Irina returned to Tri-C to begin her radiology program. By July of 2001, with just one month to go before officially completing her program, MetroHealth’s Radiology team encouraged her to apply for an open position.
Irina got the job as an X-Ray Technologist in 2001 and hasn’t looked back. She now works as a Lead Radiology Technologist and helps manage a crew of five other caregivers. She’s stayed with MetroHealth because of how much she enjoys her colleagues.
Irina’s desire to learn and grow professionally has not wavered.
She’s only three classes away from earning a master’s degree – a degree made possible through MetroHealth’s tuition reimbursement plan.
Irina has now lived in the United States for 29 years. In 2024, she celebrated her 25th anniversary of working at MetroHealth.
What’s not lost on Irina is how much help she’s gotten along the way to be where she is today.
"All my life I've had people helping me out. And now I'm paying it back."
Adapted from Irina's full story on the Simply Well blog here.
Meet Ralph Sonner
For more than 10 years, Ralph Sonner has worked at MetroHealth as Logistics Supervisor. At Main Campus most days by 4:30 a.m., he oversees a team of three dispatchers, 14 drivers and three mail clerks responsible for scheduling and transporting patients to their appointments.
For the past few years, he’s also been a fixture in the Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) Clinic – as a patient and resource for others facing laryngeal cancer. Not only does he provide emotional support, he also is an example of someone who didn’t let cancer stop him in his tracks.
Diagnosed with stage 2 laryngeal cancer in 2017, Ralph underwent weeks of radiation, then a total laryngectomy – the removal of the voice box and the permanent disconnection of the windpipe (trachea) from the nose, mouth and throat.
After more radiation, and following chemotherapy, Ralph got a tracheoesophageal voice prosthesis (TEP). The device creates a path for air to move from the lungs to the esophagus, with the sound of the air causing the top of the esophagus to vibrate the patient’s new “voice.” A couple years ago, speech therapist Erin Nutt, MS, CCC- SLP, considered how her patients might benefit from talking to Ralph, known throughout the clinic for his laid-back personality and sense of humor. He stepped in to help right away, relating to patients with empathy and experience.
Ralph says he knows how overwhelming it is to listen to a speech therapist explain how a total laryngectomy will impact the voice, swallowing and breathing.
It’s all about staying positive, moving forward, and embracing life, he says.
“A lot of times, patients are so afraid or in shock, they don’t know what to expect,” said Ralph, who has adjusted to life with a TEP and breathing from his neck instead of through his mouth and nose. “I go through everything and explain it to them. Right off the bat, I tell them, ‘Don’t let this affect you. Adapt to it and enjoy the rest of your life.’”
David Ludlow, MD, an ENT (Otolaryngology) specialist who performed Ralph’s surgery, can recall at least a half dozen patients who were scared to move forward with the total laryngectomy surgery until meeting Ralph.
“The changes someone goes through with the surgery are very life-altering,” says Dr. Ludlow. “To have somebody who’s so functional like Ralph take the time and show that he can still talk, he can still swallow, he can still work … it makes a huge difference.”
Others in the ENT Clinic say Ralph excels at tailoring his message to patients based on where they are in the process and what they’re able to handle. He has even conducted a few formal, yet relaxed sessions for nurses who want to learn more about caring for laryngectomy patients.
“Ralph likes to give back,” Dr. Ludlow says. “That’s kind of his M.O., that’s partly why he works at Metro. He likes to work hard, and he likes to help people.”
Meet Shawnese Gordon
From the first time Shawnese Gordon visited MetroHealth in her training as a Surgical Technologist, she knew this was where she wanted to work.
“The whole culture affected me from the start,” she said. “I felt more at home than I had anywhere else.”
In 2003, she finished her training and accepted a position as a Surgical Tech at MetroHealth right away.
After several years in surgery, she wanted to work more directly with patients and decided to pursue a nursing degree. In 2017, she began a new role at MetroHealth, this time as a Clinical Nurse.
Throughout the early part of her career, Shawnese had felt growing pressure at home. She was regularly subjected to emotional and verbal abuse from her partner, and the pressure built to a violent altercation that landed Shawnese in a hospital emergency room close to her home.
“I remember feeling very alone,” she said of her experience in the hospital. “There was no one there to ask how I felt. No one asked me if I had a safe place to stay. No one asked about my children.” The cold, clinical environment made her feel more isolated.
So when she began to study nursing, she knew she would provide a different type of care. She followed a path into Forensic Nursing, where she felt called to provide warm comfort and care to those who need it. She received her MSN in Forensic Nursing from Cleveland State University in 2019.
Now, Shawnese is a full-time Forensic Nurse at MetroHealth, where she cares for survivors of violence and abuse in their immediate, acute treatment as well as in their need for long-term support resources to address trauma and connect with the legal system. She is part of the SANE (Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner) team and is a certified SANE Nurse, in both pediatric and adolescent/adult care.
“I can be there for these patients—I have been in their shoes,” she said. “I have been a pregnant teen. I have been scared like so many of them. I am here to help them feel like they are not alone.”
Her time at MetroHealth has been both nurturing and inspiring, she said. And she passes that support and compassion to the patients she cares for.
In a heartfelt gesture, Shawnese gives her patients each a bracelet with inspiring words: love, hope and strength. She wears similar bracelets herself, and she finds they help her remember to keep moving forward. She hopes her patients will feel cared for, and the bracelet is a reminder of that.
“If I can put one smile on somebody’s face, I did my job,” she said.
In 2023, Cleveland.com named Shawnese one of Northeast Ohio’s 11 Top Nurses of the Year, an honor that she says made her feel especially validated in her work.
“I work nights, so sometimes it feels like I’m more disconnected from a lot of the staff,” she said. “This award told me that my work is not unnoticed. I like to think I’m a hidden gem.”
Meet Christine Alexander-Rager, MD
If medicine is a calling, MetroHealth President and CEO Christine Alexander-Rager, MD, has been on call for as long as she can remember.
“I wanted to go to nursery school to be a nurse,” she remembers, laughing.
Uncle Lou, her father’s brother and her godfather, was an OB-GYN, and when he came home every night to their large multi-generational home in Youngstown, he’d leave his black doctor’s bag on a side table, right where his preschool nieces could find it.
At the age of 4 or 5, during a family dinner, young Chrissy proclaimed, “I want to be a doctor when I grow up!”
She remembers everyone giggling and laughing, except for her grandmother, a woman who’d never finished grade school and whose own dreams were denied because she’d been promised in marriage.
“As we were clearing the table, my grandmother said to me, ‘You just don’t let anyone take your dreams. Those are yours and yours alone. Forget about people laughing at you.’
“What a life lesson for such a little girl.”
After finishing at Youngstown State University with a degree in biology, Dr. Alexander went on to graduate and medical school at The Ohio State University. She is a passionate Buckeyes fan.
Through a fellowship, she had spent a month working alongside residents at MetroHealth and said she was “flabbergasted” by the resources and support the hospital had to offer the community.
When the opportunity arose to come to MetroHealth full time in August 1997 as a family physician and Director of Obstetrical Education, it was an easy decision, she says.
“As soon as I got here, I got so immersed in taking care of our patients and focusing on our community. I just fell in love with it.”
In the more than 27 years since, “Chrissy,” as patients and colleagues affectionately call her, has cared for thousands of patients and their families; delivered hundreds of babies and inspired and guided colleagues, residents and learners in progressively more advanced leadership roles.
Before becoming MetroHealth’s President and CEO in 2024, Dr. Alexander served as Interim Chief Physician and Clinical Executive, charged with leading the health system’s clinical enterprise. She took on that role after 14 years as Chair of Family Medicine. Besides caring for patients – her first love professionally – she founded MetroHealth’s nationally recognized School Health Program, which partners with the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and other school systems to bring in-school clinics, mobile units and other services to students and their families. She also sparked creation of MetroHealth’s medical outreach to the homeless. And she served as President of MetroHealth’s Medical Staff from February 2022 to February 2024.
“She is somebody who embodies the mission,” says Katie Davis Bellamy, who worked with Dr. Alexander for years leading the School Health Program. “In all of her actions and how she treats her patients, how she treats staff, how she treats community members, she really wants to make sure she puts the patient or the people at the center of everything she does.”
As MetroHealth’s chief executive, Dr. Alexander is clear about her top priority.
“I think I’d like to be known as the CEO who really focused us on the importance of patients and the importance of our collective community,” she says. “That’s really what it’s all about, right? And that is why we’re still here nearly 200 years, because we’ve been able to our focus on what’s important.”
These stories are included in the Winter/Spring 2025 issue of GIVING. Click here to read the full newsletter.
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