A Splendid Gift

A Splendid Gift: Celebrating 60 Years in Nursing tells the story of Barbara Elle Prisceaux, who turned a childhood dream into an extraordinary career.

As a young girl in Yonkers, New York, Barbara was drawn to the nurses walking from their residence at the end of her block to the hospital several streets away. She decided then and there that she would become a nurse too by age fifteen, when her family was living in West Lawn Pennsylvania, she accepted a part-time nurse’s aide position at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Reading, and she bused twenty miles each way after school, and sometimes, on weekends. At eighteen, she was accepted into the School of Nursing at Bellevue Hospital, Class of 1962.

Including two enlistments in the Army Nurse Corps Reserves, Barbara spent most of her career on the West Coast. In 2003, she moved from California to Central Florida and changed her patient care focus from Emergency and Critical Care to Oncology Nursing.

Combining her nursing career with her love of writing, Barbara developed and coordinated educational programs in Critical Care; designed legal defense protocols for Renal Transplant litigations; cofounded Paper Chasers Medical-Legal Consultations; edited documents for Northern California District Attorneys Association, and as an Oncology Certified Nurse in Florida, specialized in clinical research and advocacy for oncology patients and their families.

Throughout her six-decade career, Barbara met challenge after challenge head-on, from ever-changing technology to hospital politics. When she retired at the age of seventy-seven, she was working two 12-hour shifts each week, providing hands-on care to patients in a medical center eighty miles from her home.