Lifelong Nurse Was Born With the Caregiving Gene

Here is another inspiring story of a dedicated nurse.

As a teenager, Rundy Hamblen dreamed of being an airline stewardess. She was born in 1921, so passenger service was still in its infancy, and a nursing degree, oddly enough, was one of the requirements for the job.

Although she never got to care for the needs of cosseted passengers traveling to glamorous world capitals, the young Wisconsin woman did get to fly eventually, as an Army nurse, and she did get relatively close to Paris -- Omaha Beach, to be exact. Four months after D-Day.
Mrs. Hamblen, a longtime Arlington County resident, died Feb. 1 of pulmonary fibrosis at Capital Hospice in Arlington. She was 86.

In a way, she was a nurse pretty much her whole life -- from age 4 until her retirement as an emergency-room nurse at D.C. General Hospital nearly eight decades later.

Born Margery Rundell in Ashland, Wis., she and her sister helped their mother, a nurse, care for people in their hometown. Her dedication to the profession, she told The Washington Post in 1999, is "something you're born with, not anything you acquire."

Making house calls with her mother, she recalled, "there'd be a grandfather on the cot in a kitchen, and it would smell like high heaven. My sister couldn't take it. She'd sit outside. I don't know why, but I could always work with my mother."

She got her nursing degree at St. Luke's Nursing School in Duluth, Minn. -- still planning to be a stewardess, as flight attendants were called -- but World War II prompted a change in plans. She enlisted in the Army Air Forces in 1943.

When she and her fellow nurses took a re-outfitted Queen Mary to England and then landed at Omaha Beach, the military was still relying on its medics. The nurses lived out of tents, with whatever clothes and supplies they could pack into duffel bags. It took a while before she got assigned to a MASH unit in Normandy and then in Germany.

"I got dubbed the psychiatric nurse," she told The Post. "Guys were what we used to call shellshocked. So many guys had seen things that blew their minds. They would stand and stare into space, going off their rocker."

Although she didn't tend to the wounded at the front, she saw many severely injured patients, including Gen. George S. Patton.

The commander of the Third Army was critically injured Dec. 9, 1945, when the Cadillac in which he was riding crashed into a truck. Mrs. Hamblen was one of two nurses who cared for the general until his death at a hospital in Heidelberg 12 days later.

"It was something she never really talked about," her daughter Jill Jones said, although Mrs. Hamblen did describe him as "a very interesting and wonderful patient."

read the rest of the story at washington post