Wilma Whitmore might be a little hard of hearing at age 87, but she hasn’t lost much else – particularly her experience as a longtime emergency nurse at Lebanon Community Hospital.
Whitmore, her family says, saved the life of her 2-year-old great-great-grandaughter Novalee, who was choking late on the night of Friday, April 24.
“I tell you, for 87 years old, she’s still saving lives,” said Whitmore’s daughter-in-law, Cathy Walker-Whitmore, who was present when the incident occurred.
Whitmore said her granddaughter, Kim Walker, had been staying in her guesthouse on Whitmore’s property next to Ames Creek on Mountain View Road. Novalee was spending the night with Kim, her grandmother, that night.
Cathy said she and Whitmore were asleep when Kim banged on the door at midnight, holding Novalee.
“She just came in, screaming a blood-curdling scream that there was something wrong with Novalee,” Cathy said. “I could hardly understand – I was still asleep.”
Whitmore had been dozing in her chair and Kim immediately took the toddler to her.
“I didn’t see breathing, nothing,” Cathy said. “Just a blank stare.”
“They brought her in and threw her into my arms,” Whitmore said. “I’d been reading a book and I was just about ready to go to bed.”
“Wilma was a nurse at the ER for years, so, I don’t know, it was just the normal thing to do to give (Novalee) to her,” Cathy said.
She said Whitmore “right away” started performing CPR while Cathy called 911.
“I was trying to get the 911, and my mouth was so dry because I’d been asleep,” she recalled. “I could hardly talk. And the dogs were barking, and (Kim) was wailing, and it was just so much chaos. And the 911 gal was trying to understand what I was saying.
“I ended up going outside because she couldn’t hear me.”
Meanwhile, Whitmore was working on the child who, Kim said, had had a “high fever.”
“I was holding her when it happened,” Kim said.
Novalee had a seizure, she said, and then stopped breathing. She said she left the guesthouse and ran to the front door – barefoot across the gravel, her mother noted.
“When I came in, she had already stopped breathing by then,” Kim said.
Cathy said her mother-in-law took over, slapping Novalee on the back, and breathing into her mouth and nose.
”The thing about when they have seizures, is to get them on their side so they are not going to aspirate,” Whitmore interjected, adding that she was attempting to perform mouth-to-mouth when she realized the child had vomited and that was what was impeding her airway.
“I flipped her over and I was pounding on her back – more than just tapping,” Whitmore said, with a slight chuckle. “I turned her back over and – still nothing. It had just occluded her airway. There was no breathing. There was no response in her eyes.”
She said she repeated the maneuver three times and finally began to detect “real shallow” breaths, and Novalee began to respond.
“She worked and worked on her for a while, and brought her back,” Cathy said.
“I said, ‘Do you want Mimi (Kim)?’ and I got a tiny ‘yes,’” Whitmore recalled.
Right about then, Cathy said, police and medics arrived and took over.
“It didn’t take long, but it seemed like forever,” Whitmore noted.
She said she felt “shook” when it was over.
“When the ambulance and everything was here, she sat down in the kitchen chair here, and just pretty much collapsed, and was crying,” Cathy said. “I was rubbing her back, and I just told her, ‘Thank you for saving her.’”
Although she worked in emergency medicine for decades, she said she’d only had to resuscitate one other young child – her youngest son Jerry, who had pneumonia when he was 6 weeks old, and choked on mucus at 3 o’clock in the morning after returning home from the hospital.
“My husband was at work and I tried mouth-to-mouth and mouth-to-nose and nothing was working,” she recalled. “I got a DeLee mucus trap (a suction device used to clear newborns’ airwaves). I put that down and he started breathing.
“God is good,” she added. “Now why would you bring home a trap like that anyhow?”
Jerry is now a nurse himself at Riverbend hospital in Springfield, she noted, along with her daughter Julie Whitmore Parks, who was an ICU nurse before retiring from Samaritan Lebanon Community Hospital. Her other sons are John, a longtime police officer in Delaware, and Jeff, who lives with Whitmore and works at a local mill.
Nursing is in their blood, it appears.
Whitmore’s mother, Grace Williams, was a nurse at Langmack Hospital in Sweet Home for many years in the late 1940s and 1950s, she said.
“She gave all the anesthetics here. Dr. Langmack flew her down in his airplane to California for training on how to use the machine.”
When Langmack Hospital closed in the early 1960s, Williams moved to the obstetrics ward at the Lebanon hospital, where “I worked days and she worked nights, we got ‘em coming and going,” Whitmore laughed.
She had graduated from Sweet Home Union High School in 1957, then trained in nursing at Providence Hospital in Portland before moving to Lebanon Community Hospital, where she worked from 1962 to 1997.
“We held hands and got coffee and prayed with people, if they wanted it,” she recalled, adding, “It’s different now. It is completely, totally different. I think they’ve lost a lot.”
Cathy said the experience highlighted two things for them: the value of older citizens and the need for people to have CPR training.
“So many people, when they get old, they’re like, ‘What am I, my purpose?’”
“The elderly, they feel like they’re just kind of useless, you know? And they feel like they’re not important anymore, but I tell you, for 87 years old, she’s still saving lives.
“She’s still important, and so many people in this town just love her,” she said of her mother-in-law.
“And, thank God, she was here.”