Home health nurse Craig Rhyne, RN, eventually may be regarded as a modern-day circuit rider who hop-skips by plane across rural America to deliver medical care, especially to American Indians.

Rhyne, 48, is in a master's degree program at Oklahoma State University to become an advanced nurse practitioner. Although he has yet to fly his first medical mission, he is a member of Angel Flight, an organization of private pilots who volunteer their time and aircraft to ferry people from the hinterlands of Texas, Kansas and other rural states to larger medical centers when they have no other means of getting there.

"Once I get my master's as a practitioner, I want to combine that with flying and do clinical work in rural health care settings," Rhyne said. "My calling is to serve Native Americans as a nurse. There are some pretty rural Indian tribes that don't get a lot of medical care."

That calling, which Rhyne can explain only as "God's hand," is why he left his native New York for Shawnee, Okla., west of Oklahoma City. Besides school and a career, he works with the Kickapoo tribe, leading a 12-step Bible study for recovering addicts.

"I'm a missionary. I'm not a preacher, but I'm concerned about people's spiritual health as well as their physical health," Rhyne said. "I find it pretty fascinating that in recent years these high-dollar studies have concluded that somebody who is healthy spiritually heals faster and is less of a burden on the insurance system."

Rhyne occasionally works in oncology at Midwest Regional Medical Center in Oklahoma City, but it is as a full-time home health nurse for Unity Health Center in Shawnee that he affirms the decision to become a nurse.

He said he knew in high school that nursing was for him, but it was later in life, while dating his wife, that she insisted he enroll in an associate degree program and prove wrong the people who said he wasn't smart enough for college. Rhyne said the other thing he heard repeatedly is that men aren't nurses, that "It's not a manly thing."

"I've made more money in other jobs, but I've never worked at anything I've enjoyed so much," said the former tractor-trailer driver, home builder, real estate appraiser and auctioneer. "You really do touch people's lives on a different level than in other professions. You have the power to make an impact.

"I was with a patient when he was first diagnosed with cancer and I was with him when he died," Rhyne said. "His wife hugged me and said, 'You know, you made him laugh the morning he died.'

"You want to know the high point in my career? That's one of them."

Beyond starting his days at about 7 a.m. with paperwork and a list of assignments, there is little that is typical in home health. Occasionally, there is the call to start an IV at night in a bad neighborhood, he said, but the unwritten rule is that people don't mess with nurses because they're there to help.

"Talk about diversity in culture in nursing, I have it," Rhyne said. "One day, I was in a house with a dirt floor and the woman cooked most of her meals outside, and later that afternoon I was in a half-million-dollar home."

What the patients have in common, though, is an appreciation of the assessments, treatments and teaching he does and the relationships that come from treating every client with dignity.

"It's kind of odd being from the Northeast, from New York state," Rhyne said. "Down here, I have patients who refuse to call me by my name. They want to talk to their 'Yankee nurse.' But really, it's 'my Yankee nurse.' "

Regardless of socioeconomics or culture, he said, "It's been found that you will get better quicker in your own surroundings. You're used to your own germs, so to speak. You're more comfortable. You're home."

And that's where he plans to apply his advanced practice skills: on a circuit of small communities of American Indians and rural residents who otherwise would lack adequate medical care.

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.