Ruhrdanz scholarships honor family’s nursing heritage

Amulti-generational family of nurses is giving back to support the next generation of health care professionals at the Bryan College of Health Sciences.

The Ruhrdanz family Paul and Joyce, their son Michael and his wife, Deb — is funding six scholarships, with the goal of enabling prospective students to pursue health care careers regardless of financial circumstances.

“The only way I was able to go to nursing school was through loans and scholarships,” says Deb, who’s a nurse in the Bryan Specialty Clinic. “We’re in an era now of paying it forward as a way to thank the people who made it possible for us.”

To say nursing runs in the family doesn’t quite capture the extent to which the profession is seemingly in their blood. Deb’s sister, Laurie Schlaman, also is a Bryan nursing graduate. Their mother, Peggy Larson, became a nurse in her 50s and worked in a nursing home for more than two decades. Deb’s mother-in-law, Joyce, and Joyce’s mom, Emma Wall, were both nurses for more than 40 years. Joyce’s aunt (Emma’s sister Margaret Jaeckel) was a nurse, too.

The field has changed dramatically since Joyce graduated from Lincoln General Hospital’s nursing school in 1959 and Deb from Bryan Memorial Hospital’s school in 1983. Instead of learning to insert IVs and esophageal tubes on sophisticated medical mannequins in simulation labs, students back then relied on their peers. “We had to do a lot of trial and error on each other,” Joyce says.

She remembers learning to assess newborns by studying 35-millimeter photo slides at home. As a neonatal nurse, Joyce closely evaluated infants shortly after birth to spot irregularities like heart murmurs, cleft palates and dislocated hips.

With more than 150 years of collective nursing experience in the family, supporting future nurses was a natural philanthropic fit. Beyond that history, Michael’s ongoing battle with kidney cancer (he was diagnosed in 2011) further solidified that the time was right for the Ruhrdanzes to give back.

As the grandson, son and husband of nurses, Michael has long understood the profession’s rigor and the importance of a quality nursing education. As he’s endured cancer treatments, surgeries and hospital stays, he’s come to appreciate nurses from the perspective of a patient, too. In January, he contacted the Bryan Foundation to explore gifting opportunities.

“We were talking about donating in our wills, but then I got to thinking, ‘Well, why in the world wait until after we’re gone?’” Michael says. “If you can do it now, start helping out.” n

You can support students, too. Please call the Bryan Foundation staff at 402-481-8605 or visit bryanhealth.org/college-gift to learn more.

Olsson co-workers

Jamie Fasnacht, Brad Marshall, Austin Vachal, Travis Anderson and Brian Jueneman are part of the engineering team that designed parking and traffic flow, drainage and other infrastructure at the cancer center.