A role reversal of love and caring

This a wonderful story about an unlikely reunion of two people who met under difficult circumstances 45 years ago.

A ROLE REVERSAL OF LOVE AND CARING

Wednesday, June 29, 2005
BY JOHN WIHBEY
Star-Ledger Staff

In June of 1960, 14-year-old Jackie Siekielski checked into St. Clare's Hospital in Denville with a knotted bellyache and running a high fever.

It was worse than anyone thought.

At one point, she had a 105.4-degree temperature, and the family minister stood praying at the foot of her bed. Six weeks passed, and after an appendectomy and a chart-full of complications, she emerged a changed girl.

The change was not just physical.

Only one thing kept her going through the pain -- her bedside nurse, "Mrs. Chipko," who gave little Jackie ice baths and told her jokes, bringing the scared child back into the world of the living. They gossiped, they laughed, and eventually Jackie went home healthy, pledging that she would someday become a bedside nurse.

The two lost touch. Each wondered about the other occasionally. But ultimately they became a memory to each other.

Then, on the evening of June 21, Elizabeth "Betty" Chipko lay on a hospital gurney in St. Clare's and peered through the fog of anesthetic from knee surgery, dimly perceiving a nurse who seemed to be insistently posing a question.

"Do you know who I am?" the nurse asked excitedly, as she fixed the post-operative apparatus around the bed. "I'm Jackie."

"214A, an appendectomy," Chipko said. A subconscious response, words bubbling up from nearly a half-century ago.

"I can't believe you took care of me," the nurse said.

"I did," Chipko replied.

News of the reunion of Elizabeth Chipko, 74, of Mount Arlington, and 59-year-old Jacquelin Siekielski Denton of Boonton quickly spread through the fourth-floor unit at St. Clare's. At least a dozen nurses stopped in to check out the story at room 408, where Chipko recovered through this past Sunday from surgery done to help her arthritic knee.

"The nurses have been just fascinated by it," said Ben Martin, spokesman for St. Clare's.

Denton, a licensed practical nurse just like her hero, had told colleagues and friends through the years about her experiences as a 14-year-old girl. She saw a patient list on June 21, faintly recognized the name of a "Betty Chipko" and walked into the room intending to help the patient -- and to find out if the miraculous had happened.



"She saved my life," Denton said. "It gives me goose bumps just to talk about it."

And Chipko, now a great-grandmother, had told her four daughters many times about that freckled, irrepressible little girl with the long Polish last name. She joked that, at 74, she can't remember what happened yesterday, but because Jackie was so young and stayed at St. Clare's so long, she remembers her distinctly.

Chipko initially didn't recognize Denton, who began working at St. Clare's in 1990, but after looking at her face intently, it started to click.

"Now that I see her, I see the little Jackie, the freckles and the smile," Chipko said. "She's got a great smile."

Chipko left St. Clare's for a private nursing facility in 1963, just a year before Denton, a mother of one, graduated from nursing school at Princeton Hospital School of Practical Nursing. Both women have left nursing from time to time to raise children, but both consider being an LPN a higher calling.

That's why Denton gave Chipko a decorative pin with an angel holding the caduceus, the serpent- entwined staff used as a symbol of the medical profession. Both think there is a touch of the divine at work in their reunion.

"Nursing is not just a job for me," Denton said, standing at Chipko's hospital bed Saturday. She looked at Chipko. "I don't think it's coincidence. It's God's way of saying life comes full circle."

Her long-lost role model, stretched out before her with tubes in her arms, couldn't agree more.

Both found they have much in common, especially the love of conversation and tart humor. They gossiped freely about nursing procedures, rolled their eyes at the politics of the profession and giggled at the downright weirdness of their roles being reversed 45 years later.

"Jackie, you talk as much as you used to," Chipko teased her. "But I guess I was the cause."

Chipko, who recalled that Denton was a blonde, then beckoned her to come closer.

"I guess your hair isn't honey gold," she said, her blue eyes mirthful.

"No, it's frosted," Denton laughed, mocking her own age.

"So's mine," Chipko exclaimed, pointing to her white hair.

But through the hilarity and high spirits of the reunion, they kept coming back to the bare facts of their improbable, and emotional, turning of tables.

"You make me out to be Florence Nightingale," Chipko said to her nurse.

Little Jackie hadn't changed, after all.

"You are."

Source[/color]