June 15, 2007
Always a Nurse
Three years shy of 80, Genesis nurse retires
DAVENPORT, IOWA - When you’ve been a nurse for 56 years and your 80th birthday looms on the horizon, thoughts of retirement inevitably sink in.
Nearing her 77th birthday and still working at Genesis Convenient Care, Pat Phillips will retire after a fulfilling and long career. She graduated from Finley Hospital in Dubuque in 1951 and has worked as a nurse ever since, spending 20 of those years with Genesis.
“It’s time,” she admits. “In three years, I’ll be 80 years old and I got to thinking, ‘How long do I want to work?’ I’ve been thinking about retiring for some time.”
All she ever wanted to be was a nurse. After high school when girlfriends talked of getting married and having children, she focused on raising the $750 needed for nurses training. “I detassled corn and worked as a telephone operator to help raise the money, and my dad came through, too,” she says.
Looking back on her career, her voice still gets choked up when she remembers her three-month rotation at Milwaukee Children’s Hospital in the early ‘50s. It was before the days of advanced neonatal intensive care units, high-frequency incubators and the polio vaccine. Medicine had far more limits, and the care of a kindly nurse was crucial where little ones suffered.
“I remember the floor of cystic fibrosis patients. I still remember the floor of ‘blue babies,’ ” she says, of the babies with heart defects whose lips and fingertips were blue because their blood couldn’t get enough oxygen. “At the time, they didn’t have the oxygen like they do now. They had big plastic sheets over their beds. Whenever we took them out, we couldn’t feed them for more than 10 minutes without them turning blue.”
Amid the polio epidemic, there was also a floor of young polio victims -- those stricken by the disease before Jonas Salk announced his vaccine to the world. Some youngsters in danger of respiratory paralysis lived in iron lungs, enormous metal boxes that enclosed their entire body up to their neck.
“You had to make sure the children with polio kept their feet on angled floor boards so they wouldn’t develop foot drop,” Phillips recalls. “Some lived in iron lungs. Others got hot packs on their affected extremities. You had to put blankets in these big metal cylinders, and hold the top down with your hands because they would vibrate. Then you’d take out the warm, wrung out blankets and put them on the children.”
Later, she went to work 28 years for physician Dr. A.R. TouVelle of Bettendorf. She remembers how his office saw 36 patients the day the first stock of polio vaccine arrived. “Later, the oral polio vaccine came out, and they had mass inoculations,” she says.
After that, she worked for Drs. Harold Miller, John Collins and Marty Ohsann, who recruited her to work in their walk-in clinic on 53rd Street in Davenport.
Most recently working for Genesis Convenient Care in Davenport and Bettendorf, her days have been dominated by ear infections, sore throats and other urgent care needs. “A lot of times, we’re the first to pick up on a health problem,” she says. Ask her what she plans to do for retirement, and she mentions spending more time with family and helping to care for a friend’s two young children. And happily, for the first time in 56 years, she can answer: “Anything I want.”
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