Patti White, Retired RN, Interview

Patti White started nursing school out of high school but was not able to finish. She got married and raised three children. She also worked as a teacher’s aide until the government closed the school. On the bright side, Patti was offered money to go to school and at the age of 48, she decided to follow her original dream of becoming an RN.

Patti started her nursing career in Pittsburgh and initially worked on a medical-surgical unit. When the administration identified a need for an oncology unit, Patti was able to attend oncology educational programs and became a member of a team of RN specialists on the new unit.

She thorouoghly enjoyed her nursing career. Read more of her story in the interview below.

Pat White interview 12-25-2026.m4a

Transcript

I love nursing because I thought of doing a good job, taking care of somebody. It was really rewarding when you saw somebody get up and go home. You were able to get up and go home. But on some parts of it, you cried. It was sad.

Tell me about one of your… most difficult experiences.

And the young girl, she was only, she had a new baby. And we watched her three months before her came out [before the baby was born]. And we watched this little girl grow up three years. And she died.

The little girl did?

The mother.

Oh, wow.

It was so sad. Yeah.

What happened to her?

She had a brain tumor.

Oh, wow. That was in the cancer floor.

Yeah. That was really sad. It was really sad. And then a young man, 29 or 30 years old, and he was working on a car. And his car, he was really into this car. And his friends came and they got the car fixed up. It was a race car like. And they drove it around the hospital so he could see it.

People doing special things for folks.

It just was, it was very hard. There was a couple people in there. somebody come in, they get chemo and they’d be there for three days of it, and they’d go home and they, but certain people you get, you click with.

Yeah.

And that was, that was fun. I’ve been, people come and go or come back and tell you, know, I’m so glad I was here.

And you can’t always save everybody, but It’s so rewarding sometimes when people have an extension of life.

Yeah.

For me, is it the same?

Yeah.

When they get to do some things that they wouldn’t have.

Right.

Especially when their kids are involved.

Yeah. We didn’t get a lot of young people. No. Most of our people were of age, you know. But the young people just killed me. Absolutely killed me. Yeah.

That is really hard for me too.

One of the girls is the secretary. She was the unit clerk. And her name was White. And then the other girl came and her name was White. They used to say the white girls were her name. Yeah. But when you work with young people, it keeps you young.

It does keep you young.

But as they got younger and I got older, they got lazy. And you go in there. rooms, they still have lunch trays in them. bathroom, they gave them the wash bags, they get washed with, and they’d be laying on the floor in the bathroom. They never cleaned up a room.

Somehow, unfortunately, I think that all kinds of things like that end up landing to the nurses. When nurses have a lot of other responsibilities, so sometimes we do get behind on that kind of stuff. But it’s hard to prioritize sometimes.

Yeah, I’m just slow. And I didn’t know that I was going downhill. And Dr. Dappert, who’s a neurologist, her mother was in the floor. And she was mad because they were giving her a feeding tube and they weren’t doing it right. And she called them, reported it, and they got it straightened away. But she said to me, she said, I’ve been watching you for a couple of years. And she says, I want you to come to my office. I said, what do you think? My back hurt. You know, it was slowing time. My writing was getting terrible. And she says, I think you have Parkinson’s. And I came home and I got my neurology book out. And sure enough, I talked, I was a pattern. I was standing there.

Yeah, I know that feeling well, finding, realizing that you’re having that slowing, that response to, that there was something progressively neurological going on.

Yeah.

I didn’t know what, but, I knew there was something.

So I went to her and I had a brain, brain MRI. And what else did I have?

DAT scan probably.

What’s that?

DAT, D-A-T. Dopamine something uptake.

I don’t know if I had that or not. But anyways. I just said, and when I said, I have Parkinson’s, I’m not dying. I could have cancer and be dying. I’m not dying.

And you’re not giving up.

I’m not giving up. Some days it’s harder than others.

Yeah. No joke about that. Yeah. So when did you, I’m gonna go back for a second to the nursing. But you said you started nursing at 48. How did you decide that you were going to go back to school?

I worked in a handicapped school and I got laid off.

Were you a teacher?

No, I was a teacher’s aide.

Teacher’s aide. And then you got laid off.

I got laid off and the government paid for me to go to school.

It’s one of those really difficult things to do, to do, that was to do nursing. So why did you choose nursing, like over teaching or something else like that? Now that teaching is easy because I know it’s not.

I just, I wanted to go to nursing school when I was younger. I went to nursing school, but I didn’t do anything.

You didn’t finish it.

No.

Okay.

And I always regretted that. So when I had the opportunity to change jobs, the government gives you a test. And that’s where my strengths went. So that’s why I went there.

It’s fascinating. That’s really interesting. So you actually went to nursing school out of high school?

Yeah.

And then you got married and had kids. put it, shelved it.

Yeah.

And then you went back. So how many years then did you practice?

Until I was almost 70.

Wow. On the cancer floor.

Yeah.

Wow, that is tough. So what year did you actually retire?

I don’t know what year it was. Because I went to a doctor’s office after I left the hospital. And I would fill in for this girlfriend of mine. And it was an infectious disease.

Oh, wow. You went from one tough one to another.

Well, the people that came in were usually pretty healthy.

Were they?

Yeah. We’d get somebody in a park, and an ambulance would bring them, and they’d be out of a nursing home or something. They’d have an infection of some sort.

Actually, there’s a lot of similarities between the genetics of cancer and the genetics of infectious disease.

Yeah.

When did you start doing infectious disease nursing?

I was still at the hospital. I was only working part-time. And they, this girlfriend of mine, she’s married to this doctor that ran the show. And he was always friendly to me, too. So they called me to come, when she would get off. Her mother was sick, and she had to go to Philadelphia. And I’d go in. And we just basically took patients in. And the doctor described an antibiotic. He’d do blood work and decide which antibiotic was the best for them. And they’d go on their way. And we had patients that had AIDS. And they would get their medicine and it’d be fine.

Was it the 80s or 90s or?

Yeah, 90s.

90s? Yeah. Okay. So there were already some antiviral drugs then?

Yeah.

So was it heavily AIDS?

No.

Okay.

We had a few, but just people unlikely that had AIDS.

Yeah. This is, there’s been such great strides in care for people who had HIV now. in terms of prevention as well as treatment.

Yeah.

It’s really kind of exciting. What about, did you see a lot of the resistance, bacterial resistance and things that we see today?

Yeah.

Were you?

That’s really what happened at the doctor’s office. A lot of patients we saw were resistant to different antibiotics.

Yeah.

Or they were allergic to them.

So this is why they were to the specialist, went to the specialist? They usually. What What did you learn from that experience? What would you, to a new nurse going into infection control or infection prevention, what would you leave that nurse with? What kind of thoughts do you have about what they need to know?

What they need to know? Cleanliness. A lot of it, you know, they don’t know animals. You know, people treat their animals like they’re their babies. And that’s okay.

I do that.

You have to be careful. a cat bite.

Yeah. Cat bite can be particularly bad.

You know, you get cellulitis. They don’t know that. And they think, you know, they let it go and they let it go and it’s going up their arm. And, you know, you have to be careful. You have to know what can happen. You know, a dog bite. You know, a bug bite.

Bug bite, yeah. I’ve had that. I’ve had IV antibiotics for that.

Spider bites.

Spider bites can be particular. Did you ever see the, what’s the one, the brown recluse that makes the hole?

Oh yeah.

Did you see a lot of that or no?

We’re in a healthy area.

Yeah.

You know, people have money to do things.

Now you, did you, where did you practice? Here.

Yeah.

Pittsburgh. Okay.

Passavant.

Okay. Yeah. So. going back to the question, if you were a nurse that was going into infection prevention or control now, what would you, what advice would you give yourself looking back?

I think I’d have to go to the books and look back.

Do you?

Yeah.

There’s so much to learn.

There’s so much to learn. I think I’d have to go and investigate that. Because there’s, I know penicillin. That’s all there was.

That’s all we had. And then everybody, everything became resistant to there right away.

Yeah.

So then what about? one of the things that happened with COVID that I’ve written quite a bit about at this point, because for me, it was a way of processing some of what had happened. Because I was vice president in a home health agency during that time. But during that time when I was learning more about COVID and becoming terrified, we ran out of PPE. So nobody had personal protective equipment. And when I talked to nurses who practiced earlier, they didn’t often use masks and gloves and gowns and things like that at that time. So you were in an infection control office. How did you guys, as clinicians, protect yourself?

Well, we had, they would put stations outside your room. And you couldn’t go in with it unless you put on a gown.

Okay. So you did the full protection. Did you, did you always know what the, what, did you always do? that kind of thing in the doctor’s office? Or did you know what bug the person had? Or were you still doing diagnostics for those patients?

No, we knew what they had. They were coming back from the hospital.

Okay.

From the hospital. So we knew what they had and what, you know, whether he’s going to change the antibiotic or what he’s going to do.

Okay.

You know. So did you? It was a follow-up.

Okay.

Almost all follow-ups. Unless we’ve got somebody who got cellulitis and didn’t know, they went to the doctors, and the doctor sent them over right away.

Okay. So you had poor knowledge of what you needed to do for that patient. Yeah. That was a little helpful.

Yeah.

Because sometimes when people come into the emergency room, nobody has a clue what’s going on with them, most of the time.

I think the worst part is if somebody’s out of it and gets a urinary tract infection, they come in and they’re out of it. They don’t know what their name is. And you find it hard to believe that they operate on a daily basis like a human being, not like a…

I had that experience. I know what you mean. Tell me about that situation. Can you think of a particular patient like that?

An older lady. And when she finally got better and started talking and making sense, I thought, this person is not like that.

This wasn’t her normal.

She became normal. So not totally normal, but she was cohesive to what was going on around her. She was a little forgetful, but not like she’d been.

Yeah.

I thought she was ready for the morgue.

Really.

Yeah, I think she’d make it through. That’s how sick she was. But in a couple of days on antibiotics, and she started coming around.

Isn’t that amazing?

It is. I was always. You think somebody’s had a stroke?

Because they’re so far down. They’re so far down the tubes.

Yeah. And they didn’t. And when people did have strokes, and Dr. Dappert, the neurologist that I had, she said, they’re not going to get better. It’s going to continue. The stroke has continued. I never figured out how she would do that.

That you could differentiate between the people that would do well and the ones who wouldn’t.

Yeah. How a stroke continued.

Yeah.

Yeah, that always, you know, how do you know that they’re not going to get better?

I don’t know, because some people have amazed me.

Yeah.

You know, I thought there was no way they’d get, they’d improve and they did.

Yeah.

So you never, never know. No.

That’s for sure.

So what, when you, Did you do a lot of precepting of new nurses? No. you didn’t.

I was gonna have to ask them. I think that these girls that came right out of high school, went to nursing school, went like a new boy.

Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom.

Yeah. They could do it.

It sounds like overall you really, you had some good times and bad times, but you really overall enjoyed your career.

I did. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed getting kept every morning and going.

Did you? Did you always work days?

No, I worked evenings and days.

Evenings and days.

Yeah.

Did you find the rotation hard?

No, you usually had a day off between.

Okay.

Before you came back.

Evenings 3 to 11.

Yeah.

Day 7 to 3. Yeah. I had a hard time transitioning from when I had to do, change shifts.

Yeah. I would get to get them mixed up. Go to work at 7 o’clock in the morning, not to be there until 4. I say, can you keep me?

Then did you do a 16 hour?

I would get up sometimes at 3 o’clock in the morning and go in. For the night shift.

Really.

If they needed somebody.

Oh, wow.

Not often.

Yeah.

But once in a while, I do that.

Well, it always seems like nurses, we’re always short. We never have quite enough of us.

Right.

So.

Never quite enough.

So were you, did they call you if they needed extra help?

They would call, I would know before I would go to bed.

Did you? Yeah. So then you would, you had a shift.

I came in.

Yeah. It sounds like it was been very, quite a bit of fun.

Yeah, I enjoyed.

Do you miss it?

Not anymore.

No? How long did you miss it?

Oh, probably five years.

Did you? Yeah. I say that I am retired from my position, but not my profession, because I’m still doing nursing, writing.

Yeah.

But not doing physical nursing anymore.

Yeah. My time is. Well, I guess a little bit of physical when somebody asks me to help with something, but, you know. Well, this was really fun. Thank you very much.

You’re welcome.