A Light Shines in Jasper

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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