She’d like to Serve Another 20 : A Nurse for 58 Years and Loving Every Minute

BALTIMORE —  Edith Sacks has been a professional nurse for 58 years and at 80, though she is quick to say she has no plans to retire, regrets that she does not have 20 more years to put into her career.

Sacks, who earned her registered nursing degree in 1930, works from 7 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. three days a week at Sinai Hospital’s special care nursery, with an eight-hour shift added on every other week to bring her total up to 160 hours a month.

“I’ve had a love affair with nursing all my life,” said Sacks, who as a little girl in Baltimore admired the sparkling white uniforms of the nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital near her grandmother’s house.

Although she came from a poor family of nine children and was forced to drop out of high school, Sacks saved up money from a department store job so she could enter the nursing school at West Baltimore General Hospital.

“It opened the whole wide world to me,” said Sacks, who continued to stay abreast of nursing developments by attending seminars at Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities.

Although she treasures her early years of nursing, Sacks would not exchange her comfortable blue scrub suit for the fussy white hats and uniforms of bygone days.

“In those long-sleeved, stiffly starched uniforms, it would have been impossible to climb over today’s ventilators (for premature babies),” she says.

And the trim-figured, blue-eyed octogenarian certainly does keep pace with nurses decades her junior.

“Miss Sacks definitely is not decoration,” says Eva Tybarski, head nurse with Sinai’s neonatal intensive care unit. “She is so motivated and driven. She pulls the same work load as nurses 40 years younger than her.”

Sacks’s sterling example also helps motivate her nursing colleagues. “She makes me feel proud because she cares so much and loves her profession,” Tybarski says.

“It’s not really my job, it’s a way of life I find exhilarating,” said Sacks, who describes herself as a “workaholic” who was never forced to split her devotion with marriage or children.

Although the remarkable senior citizen admits to being tired after a 12-hour shift, she adds, “20-year-old nurses get tired, too.”

Caring for children and infants all her nursing career, Sacks started working at Sinai’s nursery 25 years ago. The unit where she now works handles sickly infants, usually premature, as they come out of neonatal intensive care’s crisis unit.

“There’s much more equipment than when I started out. Back then nurses never even carried a stethoscope,” she said.

But although technology marches ahead and infants survive at birth weights once thought impossible, certain human factors remain the same.

“It’s so rewarding to see these ‘fragile little seedlings’ grow and develop into a healthy child,” says Sacks, who wins praise from her colleagues for her skill at handling the worried parents of struggling babies.

The nurse makes a special effort to reach out to teen-age mothers, who she says are often unfairly criticized for being irresponsible. “They are very frightened. You have to take time to show them how to take care of an infant, make them proud of those skills.”

Although she finds nursing “pure pleasure” and says she would volunteer her services if forced into mandatory retirement, Sacks sympathizes with nurses suffering from burnout and those disheartened by the stressful profession. “It’s often not what they expected,” she says.

“I feel nurses are not paid enough. You can get more money sacking groceries and no one’s life is at stake,” she continues. “Nursing is hard work and the (nursing) shortage has made it harder.”

After 58 years in the profession, Sacks does not have any magical solution to the nursing shortage facing many U.S. hospitals.

But she offers some advice to people considering a nursing career.

“It’s a profession where you can make a living no matter how many years you graduated before. You can take years off and still come back. And you can arrange your hours almost any way you want to. . . . It has many benefits that other professions don’t have.”

Sacks has no immediate plans to retire but says she will step down if she fails to meet her own high standards for nursing care.

“If I weren’t doing my duties as I should, I would know before anyone else does,” she says. “My only regret is that I don’t have 20 more years to spend.”