Mack Hall
A Light Shines in
Jasper
Last
week, nine new Jasper nursing graduates were capped and pinned before their families,
friends, instructors, and God in a traditional ceremony that has graced this
community each year for some four decades.
Over
forty years ago a number of Jasper visionaries considered the needs and
possibilities of health care in East Texas, and persuaded the people to vote
the creation of a hospital district.
Among
the first fruits of this dream were Jasper Memorial Hospital and, shortly
after, JMH’s state-sanctioned LVN school taught by my aunt, Rhoda Holmes, RN
and definitely old-school.
Many
people agree that the only thing Rhoda, of happy memory, got wrong was the
design of the school’s first nursing cap, which looked like a misshaped
cold-drink cup with some blue fringe.
More
recently, other far-seeing Jasper folks helped facilitate a satellite campus of
Angelina College, to which the Jasper LVN program has since been transferred. The hospital practicum is as intense as ever,
but vocational nursing students now join students from other disciplines in
college English, math, and science courses. The
success is demonstrable – Jasper LVN candidates are among Texas’ best in the
state board exams.
Upon
graduate, Jasper LVN candidates join for one last lesson, and that lesson is in
faith and ethics in a traditional pinning and capping ceremony which originated
with Florence Nightingale over 150 years ago.
For
this dignified ceremony Jasper nursing graduates wear traditional white
uniforms and traditional white caps.
And
at this point your humble scrivener digresses: what is with the moldy-looking scrubsuits
that now infect hospitals? When, once
upon a time, a suffering patient saw the white uniform of an RN or LVN
approaching, he knew for a certainty that the (metaphorical) cavalry had
arrived, and that all was going to be better.
Nowadays the patient cannot tell whether the slovenly-dressed individual
walking the ward is one of the health care professionals -- the nice lady who
tidies up, a surgeon, an imaging technician, the charge nurse -- or some Occupy
thug who wandered in to relieve himself on the floor.
End
of grouchy aside.
Dais
dignitaries for the occasion were: Nadia Martindale, MSN, RN, ACNS-BC; Melvin
Johnson, MA-English, MA-History; Whitney Craven-Larkin, LVN; Sharon Buffalo,
MSN, RN; Charlet Blades, MSN, RN; Amber Murphy, BSN, RN; Elizabeth Powell,
M.Ed, RN; Donald R. Samuel, M.D., M. Gilliland, M.D.; Lynn Pearson,M.D.; P.
Bidwell, M.D.; Rodney Pearson, Jasper Chief of Police; and Honore Bailey, RN
and some other letters after her name, Angelina College nursing instructor,
role model, ministering angel, and, yes, of the old school.
This
year’s graduates were: Pamela Smith Davis, Rokeshia Nicole Elam, Jana
Wise-Horton, Chelsea Nichol Livingston, Candace Cheri Locke, Amanda Michelle
Lundquist, Kari Michelle Martin, Denise Lynn O’Neal, and Christie Crawford
Williams.
The
founders of Jasper’s growing medical community are mostly gone now, but they
left a wonderful legacy. Jasper Memorial
Hospital serves more people than ever, health care providers find the area a
positive place for establishing their professional practices, Angelina College
continues the excellence of the Jasper LVN program, and the Mary Dickerson will
perhaps soon enjoy a renaissance in providing medical service.
The
Lady with the Lamp (who is just as likely to be the Gentleman) now carries a
high-tech pocket flashlight and a palm computer on her night rounds, and the
white uniform has been sacrificed temporarily for (gag) scrubs, but the
professionalism, the skill, and the care remain forever.
Those
squeaky shoes a wakeful patient might hear walking the quiet hospital corridors
at 0-dark-thirty – those aren’t really shoes, those are the wings of an angel.
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