Menchu Sanchez: Pinay nurse invited by Obama to State of the Union address

Menchu Sanchez, a Filipina nurse, gets a rare vantage view of President Obama’s State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress.

Sanchez, a nurse at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, sitted at the balcony as one of the special guests of First Lady Michelle Obama.

Menchu Sanchez is being hailed as one of the heroes of the Hurricane Sandy disaster that devastated large parts of New York and New Jersey last year.

Menchu devised a plan to transport 20 at-risk infants at the Langone Medical Center to intensive care units around the city. She organized the nurses and doctors to carefully carry the babies down eight flights of stairs with only cell phones to light the way.

Even as Menchu’s own home was flooding, she thought only of protecting the babies in her care, the White House said.

President Obama said, "We should follow the example of a New York City nurse named Menchu Sanchez. When Hurricane Sandy plunged her hospital into darkness, her thoughts were not with how her own home was faring - they were with the twenty precious newborns in her care and the rescue plan she devised that kept them all safe." - (Script taken from President Obama's 2013 State of the Union Address).

She was born, raised, and educated in the Philippines and she immigrated to the United States in the 1980s.

She has worked as a nurse in New York for more than 25 years, and has been at NYU since 2010.

Menchu Sanchez currently lives in New Jersey with her husband and two children, both of whom are in college.

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