Always a Nurse
As I was growing up in West Virginia, I never had the need to decide what work I would be doing and where I would do it. It would be nursing at Red Bird Hospital in SE Kentucky. Not long before I was to graduate from St. Mary’s School of Nursing in Hunting, West Virginia, my pastor of the Evangelical United Brethren Church came to me with a question. Although he knew I would soon be on my way to Red Bird, he said he had been told there was an urgent need for nurses in our mission hospital in EspaZola, New Mexico. He wondered whether I would consider going there. I said "yes," as if I had never known about Red Bird Hospital. I was at EspaZola Hospital for a little more than twenty years.
When I arrived there the first of November 1959, it didn’t take long to see infants die. Too many of them were taken to the doctor with severe dysentery, pneumonia, etc., late in their illness. But during the first several years I was there we saw changes, due to parents being educated to take the children for medical care before their illness became critical.
One child I will never forget was a four-year-old boy. He and his mother were walking down the pediatric hall for admission. He was wearing a suit, white shirt and tie, and looked as if he might be going to church. We took him to a room, put him to bed, and took his temperature. The first reading of that mercury thermometer made us think it was defective. We took the temperature with two more thermometers, and they had the same reading. The thermometers we had numbered up to 109E and his temperature went beyond that. We got his temperature down, treated his infection, and he went home within a few days.
I found being in New Mexico and working in the EspaZola Hospital for all those years a wonderful experience. In 1980 I went to Red Bird Hospital, the place I had known I was going, but twenty years late!
-–Margaret Craven