Myrna Bailey to be honored

By Wilma Allen Turning lemons into lemonade is an everyday occurrence for the recipient of the Santa Paula Hospital Foundation’s Meritorious Service award, registered nurse Myrna Bailey. She’s had plenty of practice.Orphaned at the age of 8, Myrna was shuffled from one foster home to another. Each one had a different slant on how to treat a little child whose mother had died of breast cancer and father had left the scene a very long time ago. Unpaid servant and source of extra income were only a few of the choices.And even though she had close relatives, a grandmother and uncles, they were not willing to take the little girl into their home, but preferred strangers raise her. Throughout the telling of this heartbreaking story, Myrna will maintain she was very lucky!And she finally did have some luck when she found a haven in the home of a minister and his wife, a registered nurse. Here, she finally felt safe and secure. Raised by these generous and kind people, she was legally adopted by them. But not as a child - it was when she was a young adult and, by then, a married woman. This couple even sent out announcements saying they were announcing the adoption of a 120-pound green-eyed girl!Inspired by her adopted mother’s career choice, nursing, Myrna went on to study at Tacoma General Hospital in Tacoma, Washington. She met and married her husband Vern and they moved to Ventura, where she worked at the old Foster Hospital which eventually became Community Memorial Hospital.It was at Community in 1962 that Myrna met Dr. Ernest Carlson. He persuaded her to come to Santa Paula Memorial, and thus began her 38-year tenure at SPMH.Myrna, one of those rare creatures, a born nurse, expresses her satisfaction in nursing as a broad spectrum of caring - not only for the patient’s physical condition, but his emotional and spiritual state of being. Her good humor and cheerful attitude must have, over the years, convinced hundreds of the most frightened and apprehensive patients that all would be well.