You might say being at the helm of medical marvels is in Roxana Reyna’s blood. Her great-grandmother, a curandera or folk healer, was often called out to ranches in their community of Hebbronville to heal people’s wounds, either through lotions and tinctures or prayer. Reyna has set a path to conjuring more with her own two hands.
“I’ve always told my kids, ‘What you do today is not for today, it’s for tomorrow,’” Reyna said, reflecting on her choice to chase ambitions that would lead to her earning a specialty degree in wound care from Emory, as well as becoming a Family Nurse Practitioner. She currently serves as a Wound Care Nurse Practitioner with Driscoll Children’s Hospital, where she has practiced in many capacities for the last 26 years. She credits her parents—her father was a Marine while her mother owned a flower shop—as the foundation of her work ethic and spirit of giving to others.
Over the last decade, Reyna has become a bit of a sensation among medical MacGyvers and researchers on a global scale. After her start at Driscoll Children’s Hospital as a NICU nurse who had paid for school by cutting hair while raising two kids, today Reyna finds herself traveling to medical conferences around the world as a nurse practitioner and researcher of wound ostomy. The passion she has for her work is contagious and has ultimately resulted in the creation of a three-person wound care team at Driscoll that provides clinical patient care and educates other nurses and nurse practitioners at the hospital.
It’s not every day that a working-class hero sees the fruits of their labor celebrated across the world, but for Reyna, every new dream begins with her patients and their own dreams of wellness.
Sixteen years ago, baby Kayla arrived in Reyna’s care at Driscoll. Kayla suffered from a rare, severe birth defect that affects fewer than 2 of every 10,000 live births annually: a giant omphalocele. The condition is as complex as its name conveys—an infant’s abdominal wall fails to close completely in gestation, causing organs to grow outside the body and into the thin, translucent sac of the umbilical cord. Having previously completed certification in wound care, Reyna saw the condition through a different lens.
“I was like, ‘The omphalocele looks like a wound—why are we treating it so differently?’” she recalled. “They were using iodine and stalling the cells, when you can actually allow them to grow.”
She got to work implementing her skills in moisture management for cell growth and healing, creating a specific method of dressing to protect from infection, with the idea being to keep the wound safe until it was time to do surgery. Kayla was able to return home with her family earlier and in great condition thanks to Reyna’s intervention, and the subsequent surgery to place her organs was a success.
Her work with baby Kayla was given a spotlight by Johnson & Johnson, and in 2014, she was invited to the White House by former President Barack Obama in a celebration of innovators in their fields. Amid the subsequent speaking engagements, awards and publications, her work as a nurse directly at bedsides never stalled, and neither has her need to share her innovations with others.
Since 2022, Reyna has made headlines for the first pediatric use of new medical technology in the form of fish skin grafts. Eliana DeVos, who was born at 23 weeks, weighed only a pound and had developed a life-threatening infection on her neck.
“This is the fish skin from the cold waters of Iceland,” Reyna said, tracing the highly magnified scans of the grafts with her computer mouse. “There are minimal viral and bacterial infections in the water, so it doesn’t have to go through rigorous cleaning. It keeps its structure and, under a microscope, looks a lot like human skin. It’s been found to help maintain moisture, reduce pain and inflammation and promote faster healing.”
The graft itself acts as a scaffold for healthy tissue to heal into. At the bedside, Reyna typically uses particles of the grafts mixed into a paste with medical-grade honey to be applied onto the wound. Hearing Reyna speak, it’s evident what wealth of knowledge she has not only on the subject but on biology and wound care as a whole. It’s no wonder she serves in many capacities as an expert source on the topic the world over.
Her background as a nurse, Reyna has found, equips her to pioneer methods and practices that benefit the healing and recovery of her patients. “Nurses spend more time with patients than anybody else,” she said in an interview with Johnson & Johnson in 2018. “That’s why doctors listen to us. That’s why we’re able to innovate.”
Reyna’s office is decorated with reminders of the patients whose lives she indelibly changed for the better, next to photos of her own family. She affectionately recalls her first fish skin recipient as her “mermaid” and doesn’t lose sight of the faces and families behind the cases.
“I don’t really see it as a job, I see it more like a gift,” Reyna said. “I take that seriously, it’s something that’s been given to me and I have to use it.”
An innovator in every sense of the word, Reyna divides her time between fellow trailblazers in her field around the world, whom she both teaches and learns from, and her South Texas community. Her rare blend of curiosity, compassion and commitment makes her an invaluable innovator and a source of inspiration for others.
