Valley Morning Star
Slice Of Life
Making rounds: Paula Cruz
For 43 years, she has made the rounds,
helping patients and doctors.
Actually she’s been providing service to patients for more than 43 years because she began working as a volunteer with the Future Nurses Club while she was in junior high school at Valley Baptist when it was located downtown on F Street, she said.
Some of her earliest memories of nursing include working at the old pediatric ward in the 1950s.
“I worked with kids,” she said. “Polio was an epidemic then.”
She recalls the heartbreaking experience of dealing with children confined to an “iron lung” or having to learn to walk on crutches in the days before the Salk vaccine.
“Nursing has changed so much,” she said of her long career. “We wore the uniforms with the big hats, the white shoes. The only people who wore scrub clothes were the ones who worked in surgery or in labor and delivery,” she said of earlier years, noting that nearly everyone wears “scrubs” in hospitals now.
Now special technicians handle many procedures and use complex machines, she said.
When she was learning to be a nurse, there were no programs in the Rio Grande Valley, she said. “That’s why I had to go to (Jefferson Davis School of Nursing) in Houston,” Cruz said.
She worked in Harlingen a short time after nursing school, then worked at hospitals in Houston for four years, then came back to Valley Baptist in 1967 and has stayed ever since, Cruz said.
She and Dr. George Toland trained in New York when Valley Baptist opened the first intensive care unit for premature infants in 1974, Cruz said. Also, she helped open the first Coronary Critical Care Unit at Valley Baptist in 1967.
The mother of three grown children and grandmother of four grandsons, Cruz said she takes an occasional fun trip to Houston as a break, but spends most of her time working.
“I love to shop,” she said. “I’m very involved with the Rio Hondo Baptist Church.”
She now has bachelors and masters degrees in nursing, Cruz said. Since 2000, she has served as an adjunct faculty member at University of Texas-Brownsville/Texas Southmost College, teaching pediatric critical care.
Slice of Life - Managing Editor Lucio Castillo
