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18 C A L I F O R N I A N U R S E W W W . C A L N U R S E S . O R G A P R I L 2 0 0 6 care for her patients' medical needs, but be politically involved to bet- ter their socioeconomic conditions. Pataki does that today by being active with CNA and serving as a member of its board of directors. An RN for more than 45 years, Pataki works in cardiac support at the Mercy General Hospital campus of Mercy Sacramento. A native of Peekskill, N.Y., a city 40 miles outside of New York City, Pataki grew up wanting to be a nurse. Her mother, actually, had always wanted to be a nurse but didn't have a chance to go to college. Her father, an electrical engineer, developed a great respect for medi- cine after a doctor friend saved him from dying of the Great Flu of 1918. This same friend paid for Pataki to attend nursing college and she later also earned a master's degree in psychology and counseling. Having been a nurse for more than 45 years, Pataki has seen her profession change dramatically. One of her early jobs was as a psych C o m i ng f r o m a fa m i ly in which many relatives lived through the Great Depres- sion and grew up on pro-New Deal val- ues, Elizabeth Pataki always considered herself more politically and socially aware than most. But it wasn't until she took a job with El Dorado County in 1968 as a public health nurse that she says her eyes were truly opened. Pataki was assigned to cover the county's rural beat, which included little towns formed and forgotten since the Gold Rush and "company towns" established around businesses such as the Ohmo Ranch lumber mill. The RN said she had never seen such abject poverty, poor health, lack of opportunity and education, and isola- tion. It was hard to believe that the country was already deep into the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, because time seemed to have skipped over these places. The lumber workers and their families still lived as if around the turn of the century, or before. "These people who worked at the mill, they were given housing but no car," explained Pataki. "So they had to charge things at the company store and they literally owed their souls to these places. They had no healthcare, and the air was always gritty with smoke and sawdust. Everybody had asthma. The families and women had no access to birth control, and I was always trying to get them into the clinics for that. This one woman I'll never forget. She was working on the sixth child, and was only in her late 20s. Another woman in her late 30s had 12 chil- dren, all girls, and she was hoping to God she wouldn't get pregnant. Her daughter, who was 13, was pregnant herself. I saw children abused by their parents, their live-in relations, incest. The places I would go were so dilapidated. They didn't have running water. If a house was elegant, that meant it had separate kitchen, dining, and bedroom areas. If it wasn't, it was just one long room, and everybody lived in the same room." She did her best to educate the families, to visit them regularly and try to convince them to find a way to get down to the clinic in Plac- erville for exams and shots. Usually that meant walking miles and miles. She checked in on new mothers and tried to monitor people with communicable diseases, like tuberculosis. The experience working in rural El Dorado was "transformative, but breaking my heart," said Pataki. After two years, she moved to Sacramento, but never forgot her obligation as a nurse to not only e l i z a b e t h pata k i has seen a lot during her 46-year career as an RN. All of it convinces her that nurses must be activists. by lucia hwang Living History