Bob Thomas Writes

Aunt Babs

I had an Aunt “Babs”.

Everyone should have one. I feel sorry for those who don’t.

She is not ordinary. Ordinary describes most everyone, and she is not like anyone I’ve ever met in my entire life.

Extra-ordinary doesn’t seem to do her justice either. . . I guess she’s just wondrous, amazing, astonishing, astounding, grand, magnificent, marvelous and any other superlatives you can imagine.

My Aunt Babs is a Registered Nurse. I know because I saw her graduate from Nursing School in 1950-something when I was about 9 years old. I sat in one of the pews at the First Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, NC and watched her walk down the aisle and receive her diploma from Presbyterian Hospital. I don’t know how everyone else in the family felt at the time, but I know I was bursting with pride. I thought that a nurse was right up there with Madam Curie . . . or even the Lone Ranger or Hoppalong Cassidy!

 To this day, my image of a ‘perfect’ nurse is the one I saw on that day. A starched white uniform, starched cap, blue cape and white shoes. All topped off with the beautiful red hair of my Aunt Babs.

 A nurse, it seemed to me in my limited experience, could make all pain and suffering go away. She wiped your tears away; she gave you the medicine the Doctor prescribed. She would mop your fevered brow, and give you a hug and assure you that your death was not imminent. A nurse was just wonderful!

I did not know until it was too late, that a nurse could also give you a shot!

With a needle! I was horrified to discover that every time I ‘sniffed’ my running nose, she would declare that I probably had the ‘flu’ and needed a shot of Penicillin! After all, Penicillin was the miracle drug of the 1950’s and could cure anything I might catch. At this point in medical history there was no such thing as a disposable needle. Shots came from a stainless steel syringe. It was the approximate size of an industrial caulking gun!

To prepare for the shot there was a lot of ‘boiling of needles’ and other chrome plated parts. Usually in a sauce pan on my Grand Mother’s kitchen stove. Then there was the ‘assembly process” when, much like a soldier with his rifle she would lay the pieces out on a towel and snap and click and rattle parts together until her ‘weapon’ was ready for ‘firing’. She then went through the loading process. She shook the bottle of Penicillin for a moment, and then she wiped the top with alcohol and inserted the needle. At this point I notice that the needle was the approximate size of a number two pencil because penicillin was apparently the consistency of pancake syrup back then and it was as long as a bicycle spoke!

A dose (about a quart) was sucked up into the syringe and she would tap on the side of the syringe to make sure there were no ‘heart stopping’ bubbles in the sauce! She would take a cotton ball soak it in alcohol and call my name… “Baaaaabeee” . . . Bobby! Come here!

I would lie down on the bed with my jeans around my ankles and she would swab my butt with alcohol and say something like, “Now if you tense up it will hurt worse!” Ha! I figured that if she couldn’t get it in she’d have to give up. By the time she touched me, my butt was so tight you couldn’t drive a nail in it with a ten pound hammer! Amazingly enough, she managed to insert the 8 or 9 inches of that needle into my hide and sloooowly squeeze in the penicillin. For the next couple of days I would limp and fain excruciating pain when she was around. Of course I also bragged to my friends that my Aunt Babs gave me a shot of Penicillin and it didn’t even hurt!

Fortunately for the rest of the world, my Aunt Babs didn’t stop at torturing small children!

She has spent her entire life caring for others.

She was a Private Duty Nurse.

Her Career of over 50 years has allowed her to spend her life caring for both the young and the elderly and all in between.

Most of her patients didn’t recover.

She has been privileged to hold the hand of people who were leaving this worldly life and going on to better things. She has helped them write their obituaries. She has picked out the clothes for their funeral. She has heard their last words. She has assured them that death was not painful. She has mopped their fevered brow. She has fulfilled their last wishes. She has notified families of their loss and helped them through the grieving process.

She has a special gift that allows her to step in and help the sick and elderly when others can’t or won’t. She has done it for everyone who needed her help. Friends. Family or Strangers.

There are a lot of people in this world today who are indebted to her, though she doesn’t think they owe her anything. She is one of the few people who believes, “If not me, who?”

But we all know that we are indebted to her for her kindness. For her humanity. For her “gift” that she gives to all of us.

Her gift? Love.

My Aunt Babs was also known as Bette Rae Thomas, RN. She passed away in 2011.

If you want to know more about her, look up, or visit the Bette Rae Thomas Community Center in Charlotte. There you will see photos of her and read a bit about her life. You will see the results of her long years of effort to get the people of Enderly Park a community center and to improve their lives in some small way. They didn’t ask her to do it. She did it because they needed it. She didn’t ask for her name to be put on it. They did it because she deserved it. It seemed such a small token for such a large life of service and caring.

I am so honored to share her last name.