Employee Spotlight: Pharmacy Tech Celebrates 20 Years At MMC & Nursing Degree – All At Once

May 2026 will go down as one of the most celebratory – and busiest – months in Nicole Chacon’s life. But knowing her, there’s still likely many, many more accomplishments and celebrations to come.

Nicole this month marked her 20^th anniversary as a Pharmacy Technician at Memorial Medical Center’s annual Employee Service Awards, earned her nursing degree from New Mexico State University, and accepted a new job as a registered nurse in Memorial’s bustling Emergency Department. It was an absolute blur, but in the best of ways.

“The nurse pinning ceremony was surreal,” Nicole said. “Realizing that I finally got to the end of the line of where I was trying to get to. And then telling myself, ‘you’re really going to be a nurse.’”

She was also one of three NMSU School of Nursing students to recently receive the prestigious Nightingale Award, a $2,500 scholarship stipend from the New Mexico Center for Nursing Excellence. Winners are recognized for their incredible dedication to their work, their studies, and their communities.

Nicole accomplished all of this while being a mom, meaning she essentially has held three full-time jobs for the last two-and-a-half years. Her constant drive stems from being a self-described “risk-taker” who continually challenges herself and wants to see what doors just may open next.

“Don’t hold back,” the El Paso native offered as advice to her healthcare peers. “Don’t stop because you feel like you’re going to let someone else down. If that’s what you want to do, then go for it. That’s what I did with nursing.”

From IV Technician to ED Nurse

Nicole first started as a Pharmacy Technician at MMC in July 2006 and, despite her propensity to pursue new things, has stayed in the role for nearly 20 years. Why? She absolutely loves what she does and the people she works with. “Honestly, the reason it took me so long to try nursing was because I enjoy what I do now,” she said.

Her long tenure has allowed her to hone her skills and learn about departments all across the hospital campus. For example, her current role as an IV Technician also means she works several days a week at Memorial Cancer Center’s Pharmacy, where Nicole works with chemotherapy and infusion medications. Because of this vast experience, Nicole has felt like she always had a leg up on her nursing student peers in all things pharmacy and medications.

And although she hasn’t been on the floor as a Pharmacy Tech in quite some time, she knows her very busy role plays a huge part in patient care and knows that she fundamentally loves taking care of people. She very much looks forward to the direct patient interaction upon which nursing is founded.

“I don’t have direct patient care as an IV Tech, but I still care about my patients. And I think that’s the difference,” she said. “That’s why I’m passionate about nursing and ready for it, because I already have that compassionate mindset.”

Nicole underwent clinical rotations at other healthcare facilities in Las Cruces, but said she ultimately knew in her heart that staying at Memorial and working in the Emergency Department would keep her where she most feels at home.

“God puts you in a place where you’re supposed to be. And when the opportunity in the ER opened, I asked, ‘can I go there?’” Nicole said. “It’s going to be the fastest pace, which I need, because I need to be doing something all the time.”

Closing one chapter and starting another

Nicole’s last semester of nursing school was incredibly challenging for a number of reasons, including feeling guilt that she was letting her Pharmacy teammates down when she had to scale back some of her shifts to focus on her studies.

This team, after all, was the same team that drew up thousands of vaccines at the peak of the COVID pandemic. Those memories will always stay with Nicole, she said.

“Nurses gave them vaccines, but someone had to draw those doses up, and it was me and four other people,” she recalled. “And we would be here at 4 o’clock in the morning, and we would prepare the doses, and then we would stay afterwards to drop the night doses. And those were some of the best times we had.”

Nicole now looks forward to making plenty of new memories at Memorial as a nurse, starting in the Emergency Department and then someday hopefully transitioning to the Intensive Care Unit.

And before her first day on the job in her “second career” as a nurse, Nicole is already looking toward a possible “third career” one day as a certified registered nurse anesthetist (CRNA). And NMSU just so happens to have just launched a CRNA program in the last couple of years.