Although nursing caps haven’t been worn in many years, Debbie Lindsay of Tarkio hung up her proverbial cap for the last time March 12, 2022, after 46 years of dedication to taking care of others. Debbie has been a registered nurse since 1976.

Debbie’s desire to take care of people started from the beginning. Her father, John Dragoo, was killed at the age of 22 while in the army. He was crushed while building a bridge and was severely injured. Although she was born one month after he died, she remembers talk of his six months of suffering and his sudden death the night before he was supposed to be discharged. When Debbie was 6 years old, her mother remarried Jack Davis, who adopted Debbie and her  siblings. Jack ran Davis Funeral Home in Tarkio and so grief was always near. With always being there to comfort and following in her sister’s footsteps, Debbie went to nursing school. Helping others fulfilled a need she didn’t know she had!

Debbie graduated from Bishop Clarkson School of Nursing in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1976. She passed her boards and started her first job at Fairfax Community Hospital as an R.N. After her first year of nursing, she moved to Norfolk, Nebraska, for a year and worked at Lutheran Hospital. Debbie then returned to Fairfax hospital and continued her nursing career.

Fairfax had around 70 beds and five medical doctors. Dr. Niedermeyer was the “Great White Father.” She said, “I worked on South Hall in the old hospital with Royanne Linsky. She was like a grandmother to me. Back in the day, we were taught to stand up when a doctor entered the nurses’ station and we mostly listened and took orders. We wore our caps with pride and only white uniforms.”

Over the years, the medical field technology has changed drastically. Debbie remarked, “I remember having to go to medical records and finding charts to get medical history, paper charting and taking blood pressures manually, which caused my hands to be so sore when monitoring them every 5-15 minutes.” Early on, she took a six-week course in cardiac care, which was the start of many continuing education classes that are so important for medical professionals. Ways of doing things are constantly changing and also the technology has advanced so much, improving the lives of the patients and making the working environment for the doctors and nurses so much easier and more efficient. “I have been a charge nurse days, evenings and nights. Twelve hour shifts came and I was a supervisor, mostly nights. I covered the ER, OB, and medical surgical floor. Back then there was not a provider in house and it was so much responsibility. Your assessments were so important and vital to the patients. We didn’t have all the labs and CT scans to rely on as they do today, not to mention ‘Google.’” She did say, “One change I don’t like is how much the insurance coverage controls the patients’ care and treatments!”

With every nursing career comes experiences of caring for people of all ages. From young to old, Debbie was responsible for nursing their ills, feeling the excitement when a patient healed and was able to return home, and once again feeling and witnessing grief as she was required to turn off the machines when there was nothing else that could be done for a dying patient. “As a nurse or any medical professional, we put up walls/barriers emotionally so we can do our job. However, when you least expect it they will come crashing down, like when I took care of the four DOAs on prom night, the baby with SIDS, or watching a non-viable premie gasping; not to mention the gunshot wounds and drownings,” she remarked. “There were the full moon nights in the ER too where you had to keep your sense of humor or cry!”

For nurses and doctors working in a hospital in the community in which they live, many times those patients are people they know and care about personally. “My most memorable times of treating my own loved ones caused PTSD, like when my mother – who was working the front desk in 1991 – had a heart attack and my sister and I were the R.N.s that night! She had what they call a ‘widow maker.’ She had nine seconds of flat line and my sister and I prayed and we believe God saved her that morning! We were blessed! She died in her sleep six years later.” She also said, “I loved being in the delivery room and witnessing new birth, but it was always bittersweet if a death and a birth occurred on the same night.”

Debbie’s nursing career helped her so much personally to know how to deal with, nurse, and care for her own family members’ illnesses, injuries, strokes, and passings. She even once had to give the Heimlich to her nine-month-old son when he took a bite of his brother’ s apple and choked on the peeling and fainted, not breathing and becoming blue! “I did mouth-to-mouth, back blows, finally the Heimlich maneuver and on a prayer he vomited up the peeling! I ran him to Dr. Bare’s office and by that time he was pink, active, and smiling. I’m sure Dr. Bare thought I was nuts! I always identified with the parents who ran their kids to the ER with high temps or whatever and they act perfectly fine!”

Besides Lutheran Hospital and Community Hospital, Debbie also worked at Tarkio Academy, working as the Director of Nursing for the last two years there, at Lake Regional Hospital in Osage Beach, Missouri, worked nights at Tarkio’s nursing home while her aunts were residents, and assisted Dianna Carpenter and Becky Heits and their mission group in Jamaica. She returned to Community Hospital-Fairfax in 2016, where she is ending her forty plus years of dedication to nursing.

Debbie said, “I am so ready to retire, but it is bittersweet. Nursing is part of who I am and it is hard to let go. I am going to sleep every night and when I have rested up I will look for hobbies! I plan to spend more time with my family, enjoy holidays, and visit my daughter in Louisiana, that is, if the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise!”