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VERNAL — You can't blame Virginia Ewell for being emotional.
"Sorry," she said, fighting back the tears that seem to come as freely as the countless hugs she has given and received over the past week.
"This is my second family," she said, clearing her throat and giving the OK for the interview to go forward.
Ewell, called "Mama V" by the scores of people who know and love her, isn't eager to talk about herself at all, or about her decision to retire after 48 years as an emergency room nurse.
"She is the modern-day Florence Nightingale," said Tawnie Reynolds, a registered nurse and the emergency room director at Ashley Regional Medical Center. "She is the epitome of a nurse and what I want to do, what I want to be."
Ewell was a licensed practical nurse in 1967 when she started working at Ashley Regional — known then as Uintah County Hospital. She quickly discovered her passion for emergency medicine.
"It's always different. It's the most challenging place you could work," Ewell said. "You always see people at their worst, so you have to be at your best."
She remembers delivering at least one baby in the hospital parking lot; having to call doctors at home during the night to return for emergency calls; and the old box van that was painted white and emblazoned with a red cross to convert it into an ambulance.
"I was in the first group of LPNs and RNs that learned how to do IVs," Ewell said. "They didn't think LPNs could give IVs and I proved them wrong. I can still prove them wrong. I was the best one in the hospital."
Ewell became a registered nurse in 1980. Five years later, the state Department of Health honored her as its Nurse of the Year. She also served as emergency room director at Ashley Regional and earned the hospital's Exceptional Service and Achievement Award.
"She was the heart of the E.R.," said Dr. Norman Nielson, who first met Ewell in 1981 and worked alongside her until her retirement last week.
"She kept emotions at bay. She kept hearts healed," he said. "She was an amazing woman."
Nielson recalled a time when Ewell donated her own blood to save the life of an infant who was born with severe anemia.
"Virginia has an unusual blood type, only 3 percent of the population has it, she's AB positive," Nielson said. "They quickly drew blood from her and transfused it into the baby. Mama V touched a lot of lives."
Ewell, 74, acknowledges that she's treated generations of Uintah Basin families over the decades.
"Sometimes I'm seeing grandchildren and great-grandchildren from people who were here in 1968 and 1969," she said, remembering one patient in particular who was "a total character."
"Foul language and disrespect, yelling and carrying on," Ewell recalled. "All I had to say was, 'Knock it off. Behave yourself,' and he'd calm right down like a little kitten. I took care of his grandma, took care of his mother, took care of him."
So what's the secret to her longevity? Don't take work home with you, Ewell said. Yet there are still moments she can never leave behind.
"When I've helped resuscitate someone, someone I knew personally," she said, her voice beginning to break with emotion. "Or when I've sat on the side of the bed and held somebody as they've passed."
Ewell suffered her own loss in February. Her husband of nearly 55 years, Rulon, lost his fight with cancer. It was a battle that kept Ewell from retiring six years ago as planned.
"Chemo is not cheap," she said. "I was basically helping pay for that. It's almost all paid off now."
Now that she's retired, she said she'll check off some of the items on her husband's bucket list, work in her yard, continue to serve her church and spend more time with her six children, 20 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Still, she knows she'll miss seeing her "second family" every day. They already miss her.
"I knew this day would come," Reynolds said. "I didn't want to be a part of it. I wanted to be with her for the rest of my career, have her right here by my side. It's a bittersweet day."
