Sandra Shupe and Daisy Brazzeal, from left, have worked at St. Joseph’s Hospital for more than 30 years.

This September, St. Joseph’s Hospital of Atlanta is inviting its 1,200 nursing school graduates back to celebrate the hospital’s 125th anniversary. Founded in 1880 by the Sisters of Mercy, St. Joseph’s opened the state’s first nursing school in 1900. It later merged with Georgia State University when hospital diploma programs were phased out in the early 1970s.

Graduates are expected to come from all over to share their memories, but alums Daisy Brazzeal, RN, BHA, and Sandra Shupe, RN, CPAN, won’t have far to travel. The two nurses have spent their careers working for the hospital where they first trained.

“When people ask me why I’ve spent more than 32 years at the same hospital, I tell them that St. Joseph’s has always met my needs,” Shupe said. “The hospital is known for its excellence in care and for having a highly qualified staff. Nurses and patients are valued.

“I’ve interviewed at other hospitals, but never saw one where compassion and ethics are so infused into the system. People feel it when they walk through the door here.”

Shupe had been raised Baptist in rural DeKalb County and never met a Catholic before starting nursing school.

“We roomed with the nuns in the dormitory and went to Mass and vespers. The habits were intimidating at first, but I learned that nuns were real people and some became dear friends,” Shupe said.

St. Joseph’s nursing students worked in the hospital while going to school. Within six weeks, students were delivering water and giving back rubs to patients at night; as seniors they were staffing units managed by registered nurses.

“After three-month rotations in surgery, psych, critical care and OB, we were ready to hit the ground running. I just reported to the nursing office to see where they needed me,” Shupe said.

Shupe served as the first charge nurse of the hospital’s first intensive care unit in 1966, and can remember when doctors wondered if nurses would be able to read an EKG monitor. “That seems like the dark ages now, with nurses [today] having so much autonomy and shared governance,” she said.

After taking leave to have children, Shupe has worked in the recovery room since the early 1970s. As manager of the pre- and postoperative care unit, she cares for about 40 to 45 patients a day, and is proud of her highly skilled staff. About 65 percent are certified in a specialty.

She’s also proud that St. Joseph’s philosophy of compassion doesn’t stop at the door. The hospital encourages community service. Shupe was on the first Mercy Care Services volunteer nurse team that provided care to Atlanta’s homeless at night.

“Like Christ did with his disciples, we washed and cared for their feet, because a lot of them were walking around barefooted,” she said. Today St. Joseph’s Mercy Care Services has health clinics and programs in shelters and other locations throughout the city.

Shupe also coordinates St. Joseph’s volunteers for Charis House, a Catholic organization that builds homes for the poor.

“We build a house a year, and there are always more than enough volunteers ready to put St. Joseph’s philosophy into action,” she said.

“That philosophy of truly serving the needs of the sick and the underserved is evident in everything we do and made it rewarding to work here,” Shupe said.

Extended family
After 48 years working in St. Joseph’s operating room, Daisy Brazzeal, 73, counts her staff as extended family.

“Surgery is an intimate group and we’ve celebrated all kinds of special times together. This is a very caring place to work,” Brazzeal said.

The Augusta native had always wanted to be a nurse and chose St. Joseph’s nursing school in 1949, because it offered an opportunity to travel. “I got to go to Washington, D.C., and Pittsburgh for my psychiatric and pediatric clinical rotations,” she said.

“I always loved surgery, getting to know my patients and teaching students,” Brazzeal said. “Back then, we did more action nursing and less computer and desk work.”

She remembers working in the OR before air conditioning was installed and writing the surgery schedule into an oversized ledger. Twice a week she worked a double shift in surgery and the emergency room in the then 150-bed downtown hospital, catching naps on the bus ride to and from home.

Today, the hospital sits on a 32-acre campus and has 346 beds, with another 64 coming by 2006.

“When we moved out to Dunwoody [in the late 1970s], we thought we were moving to the country, and we weren’t sure how it would turn out, but Atlanta and the hospital just kept growing,” she said.

Brazzeal has seen tremendous technological changes.

“We used to have to put a sandbag on either side of the head of a cataract patient and feed them after surgery,” Brazzeal said. “They’d be here five days. Now they go home in an hour.”

Brazzeal has been helping plan the nursing school reunion, which will be Sept. 22-25. “We only had addresses for 750 of the 1,200 graduates, but we’re hoping others will read about it and call,” she said.