Nurse Pile spent much of her nursing career at Meritus Medical Center (formerly Washington County Hospital) in Hagerstown, a Level 2 trauma center, handling critical care in the emergency, coronary, and intensive care departments. She also worked in interventional radiology and was a flight nurse aboard fixed-wing aircraft with Care Flight International.

“I would volunteer wherever they needed me,” she said.

Nurse Pile left the bedside for the legal side, as she puts it, in 2006, turning her desire to advocate for patients into assisting them with legal matters. She served as a consultant with another medical malpractice law firm for several years and earned a bachelor’s degree in legal studies with a minor in criminal justice from the University of Maryland University College in 2010.

In 2013, she established her own medical-legal consulting service, Elite Legal Nurses, LLC, and has been the in-house legal nurse consultant for Katie Bertram since 2014.

“I can’t stop the hurt that has already occurred to the client and the family, but I can work on our clients’ behalf to try to get them some relief,” she said.

When not working on a case, Pile enjoys spending time with her friends and family, including a son who is a sheriff’s deputy and a young grandson, as well as visiting the North Carolina beaches. A fitness enthusiast, she also likes to challenge herself. She climbed and summited Mount Kilimanjaro — a dormant volcano that’s the tallest peak in Africa at 19,341 feet above sea level — in February 2020.

Nurse Pile has lectured about medical records and legal nurse consulting at American University, the National Business Institute, the National Association of Paralegals, and the Washington, DC, Bar Association. As part of her job, she often reads through thousands of pages of medical records involving several specialists to help find evidence of wrongdoing. While clients appreciate a settlement or other compensation, their validation — and her reward — is seeing that someone believes them.

“It’s gratifying to see it proven that what they believed went wrong did go wrong. They got a chance to tell their side,” she said. “They’ve been suffering for years, and you can see the weight lifted from their shoulders.”