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As a teenager, Karen Tsang, BSN, RN, CPN, wrote a paper for school that described her desire to be an inventor one day. About a decade later, Karen immigrated to the United States after graduating from nursing school and lived on $100 per month as her husband completed his graduate program. “I have always been a dreamer, and I’ve always been very resourceful… able to make do with what I have,” Karen says. In hindsight, Karen is convinced that these traits helped her a lot when, in her 50’s, she decided to become a nurse inventor.
For more than 30 years, Karen has cared for infants who have been admitted to the hospital for bronchiolitis and other respiratory infections.
Since young infants typically breathe through their nose for the first several months of life, clearing their nasal passages when they are congested is a simple but critical step to help prevent dehydration and respiratory distress. It’s very difficult for a young infant to drink when their nose is congested.
One winter, Karen was working in a Children’s Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, caring for an infant admitted for dehydration secondary to RSV. When Karen went in to discharge the infant home, the infant’s mother became upset. “She was in tears. She refused to go home because she said she had nothing that would clear the baby’s nose. She had tried using saline drops, a bulb suction and a humidifier, which are all the things that we recommend…but they had not helped.”
The mother pleaded with Karen, insisting that the only device that effectively cleared her infant’s nose was the nasal suction machine/catheter used at the hospital.
“If you dream it, do it. It doesnt matter what age you are!”-Karen Tsang
Due to the frustration of this mother and hundreds of other parents who have expressed the same frustrations, Karen began searching the literature and brainstorming options for a portable nasal suction device that would combine the convenience of the bulb suction with the power of the hospital’s nasal suction catheter.
“I even experimented a bit on my own, learning how to connect the hospital’s device with the bulb suction to generate more effective suction from the bulb suction device,” Karen says. It was then that she realized she wanted to take the next step and invent a device. “I wanted to find a solution that utilized only one hand and was easy to use; something parents could take home that would have more suction power like the hospital suction device, but wouldn’t rely on battery or electricity.”
During her years along the way, Karen has met her strong team of supportive co-workers, colleagues, and friends to share her idea and make her dream a reality. Through several prototypes, funding ups and downs, filing a patent, FDA registry, and lots of lessons learned, Karen has made a breakthrough in the pediatric community with this one-of-a-kind device.
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Help ease infant pain and parents’ worry with narekare. We are looking for investors and partners to join us on this exciting journey!
