• Hannah Salome Rauchardt was born on a frozen December afternoon in New York City to Denise Hirsch-Cavataio. The truth of Hannah's paternity has always been a vague question, though if one were to examine her birth certificate, they would find David Rauchardt listed as her father. While it isn't a secret, Hannah doesn't advertise the fact that her parents married when she was three years old. This only furthered the question of her paternity, though Hannah has stopped asking it.
• Growing up in New York, Hannah became a worldly child fairly early in her life. Wildly independent, and frustratingly curious, she frequently exhausted her parents' patience in her early years. She often visited her parents at work, her mother being an obstetrician and her father being a stock broker, though Hannah was far more fascinated by medicine than she was Wall Street. In fact, Denise allowed Hannah to poke around her office most of her childhood.
• Hannah's interest in medicine was furthered in her early teens, after spending a summer with her great-grandmother Hirsch in Upstate New York. Nana Hirsch was eighty-five and had been battling stomach cancer for far longer than any of her doctors had expected. It was Hannah who had volunteered to stay with her great-grandmother, after overhearing an inappropriate conversation between her father and one of his colleagues. It was a wonderful time for Hannah, being the focus of her great-grandmother's attention and affection, all the while assisting Nana's hospice nurse between walks around the garden, or trips into town.
• That summer stuck with Hannah, especially as Nana Hirsch died three weeks after Hannah started her freshaman year of high school. What she had experienced with Nana, and in watching her hospice nurse, made an impression on the young woman which would in turn shape the course of her future. By the time Hannah graduated high school, she was determined to leave New York. Her parents' marriage had become ugly -- each of them engaging in extra-marital affairs, and spending more time out of the house than within it -- and Hannah wanted to put as much distance as she could between them.
• San Francisco seemed to be a natural choice, for reasons which were beyond Hannah's comprehension. Accepted into the School of Nursing and Health Professions at the University of San Francisco, her parents were happy to support her financially for as long as she needed. Hannah felt no remorse in regard to taking her parents' money. If she were honest, she would say she felt it was just compensation for dealing with their foolishness.
• Hannah blossomed in San Francisco, growing into a bright, complex young woman who was naturally empathetic, and always on the go. She moved through her academics easily, eventually earning her masters of science in nursing, becoming officially accredited as a RN-MSN. Her mind was always set on completing a doctorate in nursing, something she is still considering in the present day.
• The decision to find a position in the hospice field was a natural one, and Hannah found placement remarkably quickly. Working through the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Hospice, Hannah provides continuous hospice care to many patients at a time. Working exclusively in an inpatient hospice setting, Hannah has an amazing team of colleagues, ranging from other nurses to medical social workers etc, who support each other as much as they do their patients. After working with KPNCH for nearly a decade, she couldn't really imagine herself working anywhere else.
• Hannah finds time to incorporate self-care into her daily routine, and does, in fact, date from time to time. Adopting a collie mix from a shelter four years ago, Hannah has taken steps to ensure that she not be consumed by her work. However, that does not mean that she isn't invested nor dedicated to her patients and colleagues. It only means that Hannah knows where the boundaries lay, and how necessary they truly are. After all, who can predict what the future might bring.