Johnston County native followed her father’s advice

By Randy Capps

If you ask Stephanie Tedder Keene why she decided to become a nurse, her answer might surprise you.

“Because my daddy told me to,” she said. “He was an instructor at Wilson Community College, and had a lot of nursing friends. So he thought that was the area my sister and I needed to be in, and he highly encouraged that. I actually started nursing school before I graduated from high school. I started that winter semester, like in January. He signed me up, and back in those days it wasn’t an application. It was a matter of who would go.”

She went, and because of her compassion and dedication to her patients, she has earned the 2020 Johnston Now Honors award for Best Healthcare Professional.

“I’m greatly honored and humbled by this award,” she said. I’m only as good as God has made me to be. He gives me that strength to do what I do every day and I’m very thankful.”

For the last 17 years, Keene has worked at Johnston Health.

“It’s a great hospital to work for,” she said. “The benefits are great. I worked with Ruth Marler (Chief Operating Officer and Chief Nursing Officer), used to be Ruth Bailey, at Wilson Hospital when I first started nursing back in the 80s. She’s a great chief officer. It’s an honor to work there, really. I’m just blessed.

Working in the Therapeutic Wound Center, Keene has faced the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic firsthand.

“It’s greatly impacted all of us,” she said. “There’s a lot of fear from day to day. More so in the beginning than now, because now we’re just a little more comfortable with things and we know a little bit more than we did to start with.

“At the wound center, we were deemed essential. Because, by seeing people we kept them out of the emergency room. We stayed about the same, as far as the number of patients are concerned.”

While wearing a mask all day has been an adjustment for Keene, the rest of the protocols are old hat.

“In wound care, you have to wash your hands,” she said. “You have to take all of those precautions anyway.

“We have a great team. And we work together as a team. We love those patients. We see them every week. Some of them we see two or three times a week, some we see every day. You get to know their families, and you get to know about their life.” It’s that relationship with her patients that brings her joy in her profession.

“This morning, as a matter of fact, I had a patient that was completing a whole term of hyperbaric oxygen therapy,” she said. “It’s one of the things that we offer there, and she had just completed it. She brought us a fruit basket, and she said, ‘you guys took care of me during my worst time. When I first came in, I was very angry. I was mad at the world.’

“And a lot of them are, and you have to take it from that sense. They’re not angry at you, it’s just that they’re so sick and their whole life changes. And that’s what I told her. That’s why I love my job, because I get to see you at your worst times, but then I get to see you get better.”

There are plenty of places for talented nurses to work, but as a Kenly native whose now living in Princeton, Johnston Health is the perfect spot.

“I didn’t ever want to commute to Raleigh,” she said. “I’m a hometown Johnston County girl.”