Mindy Parks, RN: Nurse Ratched? Not Really, (shhh...don't tell anyone).

Mindy Parks, RN

She said that her father, a physical therapist, was “big in York Hospital.” All of his friends were from his work, and she remembers being “surrounded by doctors.” She recalls going with him to Barley’s nursing home and to an Easterseals location “near Vo-Tech.” She remembers her father gently dipping a patient’s hands into melted paraffin to ease their arthritic pain. These vivid memories are like they were “just yesterday.”  But the indelible images were formed more than fifty years ago, as her father had a melanoma and died on Christmas Eve when nurse Mindy Parks was three. 

She cannot forget taking his socks off after their trip to Hershey for the "Ice Capades" and asking him about the dark spot on his foot. And she can still visualize the lines painted on his chest to guide the futile radiotherapy. But young Mindy was not permitted to attend her father’s funeral, and she wonders whether it would have helped her emotionally to have been there.

Her mother worked as a hairdresser at York’s Misericordia Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, and her grandmother served as the facility’s receptionist. Encouraged to join them, Mindy spent a few summers “with the nuns.” When she was “forced” to volunteer at another nursing home (Colonial Manor) on the other side of town, she helped out with the Arts and Crafts program. She said she “couldn’t stand it,” and she vowed to “never” work with patients again.

Early Schooling and First Jobs

A year after her father passed away, her mother began a serious relationship, but she didn’t get married again until twelve years later. So she raised Mindy and her two (considerably) older brothers as a single parent. As a result, Mindy was “shuffled” among her grandparents to help out. And as she was “with older people” and had “no real direction,” all she did, she said, was “eat and gain weight.” Being “the fat kid” (one of only three) in school, she was picked on and bullied. She withdrew. School became unimportant, though she did well enough in math to consider going into accounting.

She often came home from school to an empty house (her brothers were out), and she sat in front of the TV. She started working at the Weis supermarket (just a few blocks from home) when she was 15, because she “had to.” And as her job soon began to mean more to her than school, she developed a strong work ethic.  

In fact, Mindy didn’t enjoy learning at all at Suburban High School, and “barely passed.” After she had a falling out with her mother, she decided she needed to be on her own. She moved into an apartment and required another job to support herself. She found work at Kay Jewelers. A few years passed, and as Mindy was still struggling to find herself, she took the SATs several times. She tried a few courses at York College, but didn’t have a good experience. 

With her knack for numbers, she took classes in “bookkeeping, or accounting, or something,” she vaguely recalled, but didn’t finish the full program. She continued to work at the supermarket, and found a job with a family-owned jewelry store, White’s. She worked hard (including putting in a lot of overtime) and eventually had enough money to buy her first house. But, she admitted, during this time she “wasted a lot of money buying friendship or love.”

White's Jewelry Shop (Uncredited and undated photo from Yelp)

Mindy focused on customer service at White’s, and she enjoyed helping people. She treated everyone equally, “whether they came in for a (watch) battery or a Rolex.” She liked the people and knew, she said, “not to judge a book by its cover.” And she learned a lot about people. For example, she reminded the engineers looking for the perfect engagement ring for their fiancée that “all she cares about is how pretty it looks.” 

Two Unanticipated Events and the Turn to Nursing

Her plan at the jeweler’s was to one day take over the shop. And as the hyped Y2K event (marking the year 2000) approached, this seemed possible. We were warned that computers wouldn’t know what to do when the new millennium arrived since their internal clocks stored the year in two digits, and that things would get messy. 

According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, “the fear was that when clocks struck midnight on January 1, 2000, affected computer systems, unsure of the year, would fail to operate and cause massive power outages, transportation systems to shut down, and banks to close. Widespread chaos would ensue.” 

As the threat of the end of the world led to panic buying and hoarding. White’s (including Mindy) made a lot of money; they were “selling stuff like there was no tomorrow,” she said. But the heady business cycle would change abruptly less than two years later, on September 11, 2001.  After that shock, “nobody was buying jewelry,” and Mindy needed to look elsewhere for a reliable income.

After selling jewelry and working at the Weis supermarket for 13 years, and in her thirties, with her early-life experiences in healthcare, Mindy thought about going into nursing. She looked into LPN and CNA programs at Vo-Tech.  One of her good customers, a psychiatrist no longer in practice, Dr. Marilyn Adam, saw her skills with people and encouraged her to pursue the LPN track. This tipped the scales, and Mindy began her new career. She was able to work part-time as she took (and paid for) the 11-month LPN program. She did well and won a few awards. She surprised herself: “Who knew I would love to learn!?

York Newspaper clipping of Mindy's LPN graduation
(Mindy was awarded a certificate of excellence in "Theory."
And she was recognized for perfect attendance. 

After completing the program in 2002, she took a position at York Hospital. She said that she “gave meds and did dressing changes and stuff like that.” After she was there for a few months, one of her patients set her up on a blind date with her son, the man who would later become her husband.

From LPN to RN to Charge Nurse

And after working as an LPN “for a year or two,”  Mindy saw that she “could do this.” So she moved forward and enrolled in an online RN program with Excelsior University (before it was announced that the hospital would restrict the nursing staff to RNs).  She studied intently and taught herself nursing, sociology, and psychology (she always did well with “psych patients” because, she said with a quick laugh, she “had a lot of training at home”). 

As she worked on her Associate’s degree, including weekend clinical time, Mindy figured out how to take tests. And when she did the required in-person evaluations in Indiana and Ohio, seeing patients, she knew what to expect and carefully “followed their script.” She finished the program, did an externship, and passed the NCLEX-RN exam for her RN license.

At first, Mindy spent time on a few floors at the hospital where she didn’t quite fit in. Moving around, she eventually found her niche on the Ortho-Trauma-Neuro floor in 2008, and she has been there ever since. She loves what she does, and as she developed more confidence in her abilities two years ago, she became “charge nurse,” where she is responsible for overseeing the nursing needs of the entire floor of up to 57 patients. Her goal, she told me, is “to keep the ship sailing nice and smooth.”

Reflecting on Changes

In the 23 years she has been at York Hospital, she feels that while the basics of nursing have not changed much (despite the emphasis on evidence-based practice), it seems to her that the nurses have. 

(An aside: What is the essence of what it means to nurse--a term derived from words meaning to nourish or to nurture? According to Sarah DiGregorio, nursing is a holistic endeavor that addresses the physical, emotional, social, and even spiritual needs of the cared-for individual. As such, practicing comprehensive nursing is a remarkably complicated undertaking, and it is particularly challenging to apply these ideals of care in an acute hospital setting.)

Mindy noted, with an element of chagrin, that some nurses under her charge are “task-oriented” rather than being focused on the patient. Their screens on their mobile computer carts  display icons that inform them of what they have to do, ”how to do their job.”  While such reminders of the many things that need to be addressed during a 12-hour shift may be helpful, the nurses may be inadvertently distracted from their primary responsibility, that of caring for the patient.  Mindy often reminds her staff that they are there for the patient; the patient is not there for them. 

Sue Ludwig, RN

As a tough preceptor (her stepfather called her “Nurse Ratched” even before she went into nursing), she instructed her trainees to talk to their patients to get to know them as people with a history. Don’t “just give them a pill and rush out of the room!” she said.  She had learned that taking time, and asking patients about their work, for example, encouraged them to open up, and this quickly helped build a therapeutic relationship.

She admitted that it’s easier to do this at night, her usual shift, when there’s less commotion on the floor and more time to be with the patient. (Mindy still stays in touch with one of her own formative nursing preceptors, Sue Ludwig, and they frequently take walks together. Mindy recalls often saying this to Sue: “Let me do it myself.”) 

But forming a nurturing relationship between the nurse and her patient doesn’t seem to be the stated intent of a recent hospital innovation: An AI-powered virtual nursing program. This commercial system is designed, according to the WellSpan Health website, to allow “a nursing assistant to use a computer module to remotely monitor patients who are at risk for falls, are forgetful, or may be impulsive about (sic) pulling out lines or tubes needed for their care.”  

But, continuing, it may also allow “a nurse to use a computer to remotely conduct discharges, admissions, and patient education.”  So there are now huge flat-screen monitors in each room, complete with two-way audio and video. Patients can be watched from afar throughout their stay, and they can be discharged by someone, somewhere, who has never touched them or even seen them in the flesh. The actual discharge nurse on the floor has to do something, said Mindy, even if it is just handing the patient their discharge papers.

(After some time, will the nurse on the screen be a live person using AI, or a sophisticated AI-generated image of a person indistinguishable from the real thing? We will almost certainly be encountering this dilemma soon as a result of the remarkable power of machine learning and the ongoing--and global--shortage of nurses.)

A Bachelor's Degree and a Managerial Position

Advancing her education, Mindy received a Bachelor’s degree online from the rigorous Chamberlain University College of Nursing. Since she was “horrible” in high school English, she had to teach this to herself. But she “loved school so much” by then that she made sure that her assignments were sent in at 12:01 on the day they were due, so hers would be the first. 

During the two-year program, she wrote several papers on the ideal patient-to-nurse ratio (4 to 1 seems about right) and the harmful metabolic consequences of ingesting large amounts of prepared food or (especially) drink containing high-fructose corn syrup. The teacher showed some of her papers to the other students as examples of good work. Mindy was proud of that unexpected recognition. 

As part of the curriculum, she took a class on the Vietnam War. At first, she “hated” it and had to repeatedly refer to maps to orient herself. But as she learned about the horrors of the undeclared war and the means by which the soldiers coped  (by using morphine and marijuana to dull their senses) and met patients from Vietnam, the eye-opening class turned out to be her “favorite.” 

And, through this, she was able to recognize the acute severe PTSD reaction of a Vietnam veteran (“the guy went nuts”) who was mistakenly admitted to the one room on the third floor with a close-up view of the (busy) helicopter pad.  

Trying to Comfort Another Soldier in Vietnam
(Credit: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund)

(This reminded me of my experience in that very room in January 2025.  I was admitted to the hospital with a cerebral bleed and briefly lost the ability to speak or understand what was being said to me. When I was transferred from the ICU to a regular floor, Mindy–as the charge nurse on Tower 3–stopped by on her rounds. I was still aphasic, but I recognized her from years ago and was glad to see her. But that night, the flashing lights and the whirring noise as several helicopters landed and took off in the icy cold–it had snowed the night before–made me panic. I needed to get out of there. I had already scheduled an interview with a doctor for their story, and I couldn’t let them down. And I was quite fidgety, as I had not been given any medication for my COVID-19-triggered Parkinson’s since admission. My husband stayed by my side–in the bed!–and settled me down.)  

Returning to Mindy: At the time of the interview, she told me that she was preparing for a new role, that of Assistant Nurse Manager on her floor. Though she will be away from bedside nursing herself, she is looking forward to the challenge, as quality nursing, she said, is her passion.

And looking back, Mindy said that her father was a perfectionist and that if he had not died early, she would have been a lawyer or a doctor.  There is no question about that, she believes. And she is sure that her life would have been completely different. But I am just as certain that her father would have been extremely proud of how his daughter turned out and what she has accomplished on her own and on her own terms.

References and Suggested Readings:

1. Aiken LH, Clarke SP, Sloane DM, Sochalski J, Silber JH. "Hospital Nurse Staffing and Patient Mortality, Nurse Burnout, and Job Dissatisfaction." JAMA. 2002;288(16):1987–1993. (Each additional patient per nurse was associated with a 7%  increase in the likelihood of dying within 30 days of admission and a  23%  increase in the odds of nurse burnout.)

2. Bray, George er al. Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2004, Volume 79, Issue 4, 537-543. (The consumption of high-fructose corn syrup increased more than 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990, "mirroring the rapid increase in obesity" in the US. But sucrose--table sugar--has nearly the same amount of fructose and is similar in its negative metabolic effects.)

3. DiGregorio, Sarah. Taking Care: The Story of Nursing and Its Power to Change Our World. New York: HarperCollins, 2023. (An extesively researched, well-written and important book by a journalist. In the reporting of the book she spoke ro "nurses who practice in thoughtful, innovative ways that respond to the innate right of every person and community to be valued and cared for," p. 200).

4. National Museum of American History, Behring Center. "Y2K" Accessed at https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/y2k.

Watercolor Sketch Anticipating Spring (Photo by SC)

By Anita Cherry 2/11/26

By the way, two volumes of these collected stories are now available on Amazon. Volume 1 is here, and Volume 2 is found here.

Volume 1

Volume 2