ML Clinic family medicine nurse retiring

Wilson plans to garden, travel after maybe doing nothing

After 45 years of nursing, Garnet Wilson is hanging up her stethoscope.

Wilson estimates that her last day of work at the Moses Lake Clinic's Family Medicine division will be August 13.

"Just because it's time to go do something else," she explained of the reasoning behind her retirement.

And what's on Wilson's post-retirement to-do list?

"To start with, maybe nothing," she said with a laugh, before amending the list to include gardening and short trips with her husband, Columbia Basin Herald advertorial writer Dennis Clay.

It's the end of an era for the clinic, seeing as how she's lived in Moses Lake since September 1959 and seen whole generations of families grow up under her care.

Dr. Steve Warner said he has worked alongside Wilson since 1981.

Warner said he had just seen a patient who is nearly 40, who had been seeing Wilson since she was four years old.

"We have multiple generations," he said. "That woman, for instance, had almost all of her shots by Garnet, and now she's 40 and all of her kids are out of high school, and all of her kids came up and got all of their care with Garnet. Different doctors, but all one same nurse."

Wilson said she really doesn't remember why she decided to be a nurse. She originally intended to pursue home economics, but one of her friends in high school decided to go into training to become a nurse. Wilson decided to follow suit.

Upon moving to Moses Lake, right out of training, Samaritan Healthcare called Wilson and told her that they'd heard there was a new nurse in town. The next week, Wilson held the position of charge nurse for the 3 to 11 p.m. shift. A charge nurse is the head of the shift and takes care of everything but the OB department, she explained.

"Which I'd never thought I'd have to do, all by myself, just out of training," she said of the position. "It was a real education, coming up here."

Nursing has changed a "whole bunch" since she started, Wilson said. Nothing was disposable in the beginning, and Wilson remembered having to wash blood out of surgical gloves or running cotton balls over needles to determine if they had a hook. If it did, then the needle had to be sharpened with sandstone, she said.

"Anything we do now is just much more streamline," she said. "It was quite a trial back in those days to keep your IVs running with just a needle stuck in somebody's arm."

A person's length of stay in the hospital is reduced today as well, Wilson said, and back when she was first starting out, she didn't even have a place for a telephone.

"People didn't call all the time," she said. "If they'd come in, they were seen and whatever … Now I have a phone with a voice mail and you get beaucoup messages a day."

Wilson said that it's a sign of the times where people can't afford to come in to a doctor's office in person so often.

"We get a lot of phone calls, a lot of questions," she said. "People just ask more about health things than they used to."

Wilson said one of her favorite things about working in the family medicine division is the aforementioned chance to see families grow up.

"I've seen several generations," she said. "So many people have hit me at the door and said, 'You cannot retire, you're the only nurse I've ever known.' A girl said yesterday, 'I've got two more years of high school. You need to work two more years!' I thought that was pretty good."

Wilson said she has enjoyed her years of service, and hopes that other people consider nursing as a career.

"It'd be nice to think some young girl would think, 'Geez, sounds pretty good — maybe I would like to be a nurse,'" she said. "Nursing now, they have so many more things to go into … I'd like to see them because I want to have somebody take care of me in my old age."

"I'm upset," Warner said about Wilson's retirement. "She was supposed to wait until I retired. So I've decided to retire also."

Really?

"No," he said with a grin. "What's best (about Wilson) is how she cares for her patients. She's been doing that for all the years that I've known her … Her patients knew her, they were disappointed when she wasn't here. She almost never missed work for being sick … When they have a substitute, they're upset."