AFTER more than 40 years, Wodonga’s Maria Stastny still can’t help herself when it comes to nursing.
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Despite her retirement from Wodonga hospital, Mrs Stastny still strips beds in the wards whenever she visits her former colleagues.
The nursing veteran officially called it a day on May 11 — she had been on long service leave since November — 41 years after beginning work as a nurse’s aide in 1974.
Mrs Stastny yesterday recalled times she had supported patients through times of personal tragedy and treated multiple generations of the same families.
She won’t forget an American man in 1985 who was her patient for eight weeks after he sustained serious injuries in a car accident at Corryong which killed his wife.
Mrs Stastny said he had returned to US with his wife’s ashes but came back to Wodonga two years later to return the crutches. She still has a picture of the patient in her purse.
Mrs Stastny also remembered bathing a baby so the mother could take the newborn home.
The baby’s grandmother then reminded Mrs Statsny that she had done the same thing for her when her daughter, the new mother, had been born decades earlier.
“You get so busy you forget the people you look after grow up,” she said.
Mrs Stastny left Prague and arrived in Wodonga with her husband in 1969, where they lived at the Bonegilla migrant camp.
She worked as an assistant in the hospital wards in Bonegilla before the camp closed in 1972.
Mrs Stastny said nursing was never dull and she had practised every type of nursing except in theatre.
She remembered the tight-knit community when she started at Wodonga hospital.
When she graduated as a nurse’s aide, she became a state enrolled nurse and then an enrolled nurse before qualifying as a Division 2 nurse.
“I had no time to rest on my laurels,” she said.
Mrs Stastny said she had wanted to be a nurse since she was seven.
“My father died of cancer at home and my mother had always said she wished she had some nursing skills,” she said.
Over time Mrs Stastny said technology had changed the most.
Mrs Stastny said she would take some time to relax into retirement before throwing herself into volunteer work.
