LI nurse receives home renovation thanks to 'The Drew Barrymore Show'

Uniondale's Victoria Osei, an assistant nurse manager at Northwell Health's Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hospital and a volunteer in her church's food and clothing drives, has been gifted with a kitchen, dining and living-room renovation that will be revealed on Friday's "The Drew Barrymore Show" (9 a.m., WCBS/2).

"It's still like I'm in a dream land," Ghanaian immigrant Osei, 61, told Newsday. "I come home and I open the door and I just soak it all in, and it's like it's not real, it's so beautiful. I tell myself, what did I do to deserve this?"

Plenty, according to Merrill Mathew, her hospital's director of patient-care services. "He called me one day and said, 'You know, this show is looking for a nurse that does outreach stuff and works with the community. I think you'll be perfect for it. What do you think?' And I said OK, so he put my name in for what I thought was a contest."

A producer eventually contacted Osei with news she had won tickets to a taping of the syndicated show in Manhattan. On Sept. 21, she and two of her four grown children with husband Abraham, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority employee, were in the audience.

"I was told I will be asking Drew a question, because a hobby of mine is I love to cook, so I should prepare a question about something in the kitchen. So I'm rehearsing and reciting in my head what I will ask her."

Barrymore, 46, instead brought Osei onstage. "Oh my God," the nurse marvels. "I was freaking out. I did not know they had done background checks and came to my house already without me knowing, but my family knew." Barrymore, she says, "talked about how I work with the homeless" through Queens' First Presbyterian Church of Newtown, where Osei has also helped organize a health fair.

The show's contractors finished work on Nov. 5, after treating Osei, Abraham and their two children still living at home to a week in a hotel in order to keep the big reveal secret.

An overwhelmed Osei that day told Barrymore, "I had three women in my life. Now you make the fourth. My grandmother raised me because I was a product of two teenage parents, so they couldn't care for me. And my aunt brought me to this country [in 1978] after my mom died and my grandmother died. And of course, my mom who gave birth to me."

Osei worked 12 years for Merrill Lynch before leaving to get her nursing degree via LaGuardia Community College, in Queens; the Helene Fuld College of Nursing, in Harlem; and finally Adelphi University in Garden City. She worked at Glen Cove Hospital for 10 years before being transferred to LIJ Forest Hills.

"My dream was always to become a gerontology nurse and care for the elderly," Osei says. "Because of the love my grandmother gave me, I always wanted to do this."