In fact, when we spoke a few days before the Emmys, she hadn’t prepared an acceptance speech yet, but she was already thinking about the pints of McConnell’s ice cream—mint chip and peanut butter—waiting in her fridge for after the show. “Win or lose, I will be eating ice cream,” she says.
Shortly after getting sober, obstacles continued to present themself to LaNasa. She received a breast cancer diagnosis in 2023, but even through the pain, she kept looking ahead. Once she had a treatment plan, LaNasa gave herself something to look forward to on the other side: a three-week trip to Sicily. Her advice to someone fighting cancer now is to plan something fun for when treatment ends. “I know everyone can’t take a three-week trip to Sicily, but do something…. Get your mammogram, but find out where the nearby froyo place is for after.”
Eventually, LaNasa’s health improved. “Cancer is a real head trip any way you slice it,” she says. “Really, I think I’m a better person because of cancer.”
When Nurse Dana came along, she had the confidence and experience to make bold, calculated choices. To develop Dana’s Pittsburgh accent, LaNasa and her dialect coach searched through one of the internet’s biggest repositories of regional speech. “You can listen to all different kinds of people get up in these local city meetings,” she says. She studied the uniquely Pittsburgh regionalisms—“clouds” becoming “clads.” She also latched onto the specific way local sports broadcasters say “terrible towel” when they talk about the famous Pittsburgh Steelers good luck charm. Her biggest problem now is dropping the accent in her personal life. “I do end up sounding like Dana,” LaNasa says. “It’s hard.”
She imagines Dana as a minimalist even when she isn’t in scrubs: classic Levi’s, old penny loafers or sneakers, good sweaters, and a work jacket. LaNasa’s own style, she says, is “much more feminine and a little more frivolous…I think I dress kind of French.”
