Nurse retiring after four decades of service in Spring Grove

From early on in Barb Nelson's life, she was used to caring for animals - namely, the cows and other livestock she helped raise on the family farm outside Mabel, Minn. But in high school, she got a job caring for people, and that experience touched off the trajectory of her life's work.

Now, after 41 years and countless patients under her care, nurse Nelson is leaving her station. She's retiring from Emplify Health by Gundersen Spring Grove Clinic after four decades of work - all of them spent in Spring Grove. Hers is a legacy that spans the changing landscape of healthcare in the small town, which at one time included a 10-bed hospital with adjacent emergency room.

A nurse of all trades

While Nelson, whose last day at the clinic is Dec. 18, enjoyed the honest work involved with operating a farm, she took an opportunity to work off the farm as a health aid at the local nursing home as a teenager, "and you actually got paid!"

It was a great job at the time, Nelson said, but she knew it wasn't one she'd stay in forever, so right out of high school, she enrolled in nursing school in Rochester - getting a job at St. Mary's Hospital after graduation. She worked there just a year before getting married and moving back to Mabel.

While her husband continued to farm, Nelson began her time in Spring Grove as a nurse in the town's hospital and the attached nursing home.

"That was quite a transition to come from a big hospital to here," Nelson said. "You just came, and they gave you keys and said good luck."

In a small town, she learned to do it all. Rather than specialize in one area, as nurses do at larger facilities, Nelson was starting IVs, mixing drugs, hanging blood bags and caring for newborn babies - which were delivered locally until 1985.

"You come here, and you were the only RN in the whole building, so you were in charge," she said. "You could be running your tail off in the hospital and have a cardiac arrest come through the ER, so then you're managing that, too. And you're still the only RN here."

Nelson liked the frenetic pace of the hospital, adding that the emergency room was her favorite place to work. Eventually, however, a nurse was needed in the clinic when it moved from the hospital to Tweeten Nursing Home on the edge of town, so Nelson - with her willingness to try something new - was lured away from the hospital after one year to the clinic, where she worked the rest of her days.

'I've been so blessed'

Nelson always intended to retire at age 60, but in 2018, she became ill with bacterial meningitis. It was a difficult road to recovery, she said, but she worked hard to get back to her previous self. Then 60 came and went, and she continued to work. Doing so led her through a once-in-a-career challenge: the COVID-19 pandemic.

"I'm so used to knowing about what I see in patients, and if you don't know it, you can ask somebody. You ask the doctor you work with, and they'll tell you," she said. "COVID, nobody knew anything. And looking back now, we'd all do things a lot different. But you don't know."

But now, Nelson decided the time is right to step away from the only career - the only workplace - she's ever known.

"I have a big bucket list. I love to travel and see new things, learn new things," she said, adding, though, that she plans to volunteer in the hospice program. "I have a lot of respect for the hospice program and nurses."

No matter what she decides to do, Nelson will stay busy. In addition to her planned hospice volunteering, she and her husband own two livestock marketing businesses in Lanesboro and Decorah. And, they still have the farm where they raise registered angus and Simmental cattle, where she'll continue to keep the books.

But nursing will always be a part of who she is.

"I've been so blessed. I've had a great, great nursing career here in Spring Grove," Nelson said. "Our community is awesome; we have amazing patients."

She'll miss the work itself, but mostly, she'll just miss the people - entire families - that she's come to know and care for over the years, as well as "the best" co-workers who've become like a second family.

"I've had an incredible time here," she said. "I'm not sure how it's gone so fast."