Honoring Others
From celebrating a granddaughter's achievements to memorializing a nurse's commitment to her profession, the following gifts illustrate how families and classmates are honoring others with gifts to the School of Nursing.
Patsy Getz 52/54N 58MN (second from left) and her sister, Betty Atwater (third from left), at an alumni event
A lifetime of caring
Patsy Getz 52/54N 58MN enrolled at Emory to study nursing and never left. She taught adult health in the nursing school and worked as a clinical nurse, primarily in orthopaedics, at Emory University Hospital. Because of her skills in orthopaedics, Getz was asked to join the Emory Center for Rehabilitation Medicine when it opened in 1976. She “retired” in 1991 but soon resumed working at Wesley Woods Center.
“The same qualities that made her a great parent made her a great nurse,” says her son, Miller Getz. “She liked caring for other people.”
Getz imbued her son and her daughter, Anna, with the same values. “She taught us that other people’s needs often are more important than our own,” adds Miller, whose daughter is a pre-nursing student at Oxford College. Anna’s daughter, a junior in high school, also plans to pursue a career in nursing.
Their mother was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nurses’ Alumni Association (NAA), helping lead the annual fund-raising campaign. She served as president of the NAA and received its Award of Honor in 2002. When Getz died of metastatic cancer in 2009, her family asked that memorial gifts be sent to the nursing school in her honor.
“We knew that’s what she would have wanted,” says Miller. “The school was very special to her.”
