LEWISTON — Walking home from middle school, Lisa Cailler would often see nurses crossing the street from St. Mary’s Hospital to the nursing home across the way. There was something about the group of women in white.

“I’ve always wanted to be in nursing, always wanted to take care of people who were sick and injured,” Cailler said. She remembers seeing the nurses and thinking to herself: “‘Oh, I can’t wait.’ I would always have that dream that someday, someday, I would be like that.”

She grew up, became a nurse and in 2003, fell into a new specialty.

Fall is Cailler’s season. She’s the local queen of the flu shot.

In the past 12 years, she’s administered thousands of doses. She’ll give about 400 shots this fall.

“There is always one in the crowd who says, ‘Did you save the square needle for me?'” Cailler said. “Or it’s one of the ladies who says, ‘For him, you need to save the long, dull needle.'”

Just a healthy dose of flu shot humor.

Cailler, who lives in Poland, graduated from Lewiston High School in 1985 and went to work at Maine Medical Center in Portland after college in special care. She worked with a lot of burn victims. Cailler said she loved it there, helping those patients and watching them heal, but eventually, the hours and commute were too much.

In 1994, she took a job at Androscoggin Home Care & Hospice heading into people’s homes to bring care to them. In 2003, she became clinical liaison there, working with doctors’ practices and nursing facilities. That’s when she inherited the duties of running the flu shot clinics for local nursing homes and assisted living centers.

This fall, she has 19 clinics on her docket.

At large clinics like Schooner Estates, she’ll have help. Otherwise, she flies solo.

“I try to take a couple minutes with each one,” Cailler said. “They give me updates on their year. We have a good time. I enjoy it just as much as they do.”

Once they’re ready to roll up their sleeves for her, the shots aren’t a tough sell.

“They live close to one another,” she said. “If one gets sick, they have the potential for many to get ill, and they know how important it is.”

So it means fall is the one season where Cailler gets back to her one-on-one patient roots, a few minutes and one poke at a time.

“I love what I do,” she said. “It’s all come true.”

Know someone everyone knows? Contact staff writer Kathryn Skelton at 689-2844 or kskelton@sunjournal.com