It's a wonderful gift, to have a nurse in the family.
When I was a child, my brothers and my sister and I rarely had to sit in the doctor's office, catching whatever “achoo” was there to be caught. It was our Aunt Sis, Janie Warren, who took care of us. She diagnosed the ailment and provided the cure, in consultation with Dr. Dickert on his hospital rounds. Voila, we felt better.
My grandmother once crushed her thumb in the wringer of the washing machine, and it was Aunt Sis who changed Ma-ma's bandages and smoothed on the ointments and offered coaching through her “exercises” (now called physical therapy).
Every time a neighborhood kid near Summer Street fell off a bike or from a tree, it was Aunt Sis who determined whether the injury required a trip to the emergency room or a simple soap-and-water clean-up with a stern admonition, “Don't you do that again!”
Sadly, times have changed. Nurses can't do that level of full-service health care any more, but Aunt Sis saved our parents a great deal of time and worry-and she probably saved us a visit from the truant officer. (Sadly, she was a wonder at diagnosing the “test flu.”)
Yes, we were incredibly lucky to have Aunt Sis on call when we were kids at full-tilt play.
Lucky, indeed, since Aunt Sis could have chosen to live where she wasn't on call, 24/7, for ailing family and injured neighborhood children.
During World War II she moved to Washington, D.C., after her graduation from nurses' training at Spartanburg. Her brother, my father, was a Marine, and she wanted to help servicemen who had been wounded.
While in Washington, she shared a room with five other nurses whose schedules allowed them to sleep at different times, and they worked long hours to care for our nation's wounded.
Aunt Sis was also assigned to care for a woman whose voice stirred many a heart-and opened many a wallet-to buy tanks and ships and planes at War Bond rallies.
“God Bless America” may have been written by Irving Berlin, but it is Kate Smith's name we now associate with the song. Her recording was so beloved during World War II that a national movement was launched to make it our national anthem.
For a two-week hospital stay, Aunt Sis was Kate Smith's nurse, and one would think that she might have mentioned her celebrity patient at some point during my childhood. She didn't. I never knew Aunt Sis had any connection to Kate Smith until a few years back, way into my adulthood.
The patients that she recalled most vividly were the soldiers. It became her mission to return them home, safe and sound. She knew all too well how their families worried for them, prayed for them: her brother had been wounded on Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.
In Ken Burns' series on World War II, he talked with many soldiers who were grateful for the skill and the kindness of the nurses who cared for them-but his series ended when the war ended.
For nurses, though, the end of the war signalled the beginning of a another mission: a lifelong mission to care for their families and their neighbors.
Oh, Aunt Sis could have done her “mission work” in Washington.
I love the story of how she arrived back home...
As Christmas of 1945 approached, everyone in my father's family was breathlessly anticipating his return from war, hoping fervently that he would fully recover from the surgery to remove Japanese schrapnel from his legs.
More than anything in all the world, Aunt Sis wanted to see her brother that Christmas, to make sure that he was healing as he should.
She requested time off for a visit home, but she was told no. The nurses with children wanted to see them play with their gifts from Santa on Christmas morning, and other nurses had seniority over Aunt Sis. Those nurses would have first choice of hours over the holidays, and Aunt Sis should count on working through the holidays.
She begged for the time off, explaining that her brother had been wounded in the Pacific, and he was coming home. She hadn't seen her parents in far too long, and she missed her sisters. She had to go home for Christmas, she had to go home.
Her pleading fell on deaf ears, and what Aunt Sis did next followed her heart.
She quit her job, bought a train ticket home, and began her mission here in Newberry.
For 36 years she worked at Newberry County Memorial Hospital. In all that time, she treated every patient, whatever the age or the color or the income level, with the same respect and skill with which she had nursed the soldiers-as if they were family.
Indeed, they were family to someone, and they deserved nothing less than her best.
When my grandfather died after years of being bedridden, Aunt Sis greeted by name an incredible number of people who brought food to my grandmother's house-people that my grandmother did not know.
All were former patients or members of patients' families, still grateful for the kindnesses and the comfort she had offered.
Failed attempts at “test flu” aside, I am grateful that Aunt Sis brought her good-looking/sassy self back to the ‘Berry.
I am grateful, too, for those who now care for her at Springfield Place with the same kindnesses she once offered to others.
Some of those folks, she once cared for in the hospital.
It seems that may become a rare thing.
During my mother's recent hospital stay in Columbia, I became aware that there are now “traveling nurses.” They may live in Tennessee or Alabama, but they work for months at a time away from home. Their care was perfectly fine, but I wonder...
Do the neighborhood children know where they live? Do they stand by the x-ray machine with a nephew when he is scared that he may have broken an arm? Do they enter the delivery room with a niece in labor, offering a hand to hold and comforting words, “It's going to be all right.”
Probably not.
When I was a kid, Aunt Sis would always come to see Ma-ma after her shift ended at three. Every time she stepped in the door, she was snapping her fingers and singing “Hey Good Looking.”
Hey, good lookin’, Whatcha got cookin’?
How's about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?
I got a hot-rod Ford and a two-dollar bill.
And I know a spot right over the hill.
Thank goodness, she didn't stay “over the hill” for long.
Alright, folks, now I'm asking you to do something for me. You all know nurses who live and work among us. Tell them thank you, please.
And thanks, Aunt Sis, for coming home.
We're not famous like Kate Smith, but we sure do love you.
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