The King Family

Myra King, DNP, APRN-CNS, ACNS-BC, CCRN-CSC, FCNS, was nervous when she was asked to appear in an intranet video about her nursing journey. She is, by her own account, shy. She did what she always does. She leaned into her faith, praying that if her future husband happened to work at Cleveland Clinic, too, he would see the video and find her.

A few weeks later, an electrician from Facilities Engineering recognized her. Myra and Gary King married in 2018.

Gary came to Cleveland Clinic the long way. He applied three times before he was hired, following a stint at the sewer district. He wanted to work in a hospital, he says, because he wanted to be around people.

After he retires, he might want to come back as a Red Coat on Main Campus, helping to guide visitors. He can’t quite picture a life away from the place.

“I’m an electrician,” Gary says. “But I wasn’t put here just to be an electrician.”

Myra has spent her entire career in cardiac care. She was a new graduate nurse, still in the early days of orientation, when her father underwent open heart surgery. His heart stopped, and he died, in the unit where she had just begun to work.

She never left that patient population. She’s now a director of advanced practice nursing and clinical nurse specialist in the cardiovascular ICU.

“My mom instilled a spiritual upbringing in us,” she says. “Inherent in that is this calling to help people and to give of yourself. Sometimes I can be walking down a hallway, and I might see somebody in a certain condition. I don’t know the person, but I’ll just say a short prayer for them. Because we don’t know what’s going on in other people’s lives.”

In the thick of the coronavirus pandemic, Myra became a patient herself. Breast cancer. Her colleagues provided meals for her and Gary for weeks.

“They were more than just my care team,” she says. “They were my lifeline.”

Her older sister was watching, too. Selena Fluker, RN, BSN, became a cancer research nurse in the Novel Therapeutics Clinic at the Taussig Cancer Center, where she works with patients in Phase I  clinical trials. Her sister’s illness, she says, is what sent her there.

For these relatives, Cleveland Clinic is a family business. Sandra Fluker, mother of Myra and Selena, was a unit secretary. Monique Anderson, Gary’s cousin, was a clinical technician. Domonic King — 
Gary and Myra’s son — works in pre-access, securing insurance authorizations that clear patients for care.

“You can’t really tell our family’s story,” Domonic says, “without talking about Cleveland Clinic.”

Myra’s cousins Jason Hunt, RN, and Kiah White, RN, BSN, are also nurses. He works on a nephrology/ENT/dermatology unit at Main Campus. She works in the emergency department at Cleveland Clinic South Pointe Hospital.

Pamela Combs, DNP, APRN-CNP, Myra’s aunt, has given Cleveland Clinic some 30 years as a nurse practitioner. She left for a decade and came back, a return she describes as coming home. She now directs the Howley ASPIRE Program, the philanthropically funded healthcare career pipeline whose recent graduates include Kiah.

“Family is important,” Pamela says. “What you hand down reverberates through generations. My nieces are younger than I am, and I tell them the work they’re doing is going to affect people they’ll never meet.”

At their family gatherings, they have a running joke.

“We have all these nurses in our family,” Selena says. “So if somebody goes down, it’s like, ‘OK, you take the heart, you switch off on chest compressions, you take this.’”

They talk about work often, off in a corner at every function, until somebody finally asks: What about the rest of us?

“We’re blessed to have each other,” Gary says. “And we’re blessed to work here.”