It’s easy to let Deborah Tuggle, MN, RN, a critical care clinical nurse specialist, tell her own nursing story. It’s one of family tradition and caring, entrepreneurship and education and a passion for the best in all of nursing, not just her specialty of cardiac care.

Tuggle tells her story with the folksiness of her critical care continuing education courses and lectures, and in the unshakable Southern accent of her native Louisville, Ky.

“My father’s a doctor and we’ve got medical people way back eons. My dad and his dad and his dad before him and on and on back. A lot of doctors. All the way to Samuel Mudd, who took care of John Wilkes Booth. We’re still trying to clear his name,” she said with a laugh.

So the decision to become a nurse, although her father wanted her to be a physician, wasn’t something she labored over. On television, critical care looked cool, Tuggle said, and after graduating from the University of Kentucky nursing school in 1976, “I got into it and found this really is neat. People are just so emotional in that setting. You can really do a lot for family members if not for the patients themselves. I’ve always liked that part of nursing. I like the family connection a lot.

“I have a huge family. A lot of them are elderly and I spend time monitoring their care … helping them navigate through the health care system and making sure they get the care they should get,” she said. That’s particularly true since Tuggle returned to Louisville five years ago from Washington state, where her husband, now retired, was stationed with the Air Force.

It was at the University of Washington that Tuggle earned a master’s degree and the desire to teach tugged so hard at her heart that she went into business for herself.

“To be honest, I could not get a job in my hospital as an educator without getting paid less than I was making as a 3-to-11 staff nurse,” she said. “They weren’t paying me for my master’s and they were actually going to be paying me less because I wouldn’t get my shift differential. I was horrified and insulted.”

After finding that other hospitals wanted her to handle orientation, fire drills and other things she didn’t want to do, Tuggle decided to capitalize on the ever-changing nature of critical care—and especially cardiac care—with continuing education courses. She was encouraged that university classmates “thought it was a kick to listen to me talk” because of her accent and they thought she was funny. “I’m kind of a ham,” she said.

“I put out a flier for a basic assessment class and a hemodynamic monitoring class. Two one-day workshops. I put them on in a restaurant meeting room,” Tuggle said. “I literally hand-carried these fliers around and shook hands and hung them in bathrooms. Anything I could think of.” While she said mostly her friends came, “I broke even. Didn’t lose a dime.”

Tuggle said the demand for critical care knowledge is such that she now can earn as much as she wants by arranging courses, teaching and lining up additional lecturers. But at age 48, her focus is shifting toward guest appearances where “I can just do what I do best, which is put on my talks.”

“Cardiac is in constant motion because it’s the No.1 cause of death in our country,” Tuggle said. “I don’t know how to express the change. All I know is that if it’s been more than two months since I’ve spoken on a cardiovascular subject, I have to do another research base and go through another whole literature review to make sure nothing has come out.”

She digs into the Internet, attends tons of conferences, religiously reads pharmaceutical companies’ material and research literature and works critical care for an agency to stay up-to-date and relevant to RNs. As an instructor, she said, “They don’t like it when they think you’re not relating to what they’re dealing with. They can read that and they just tune you out.”

“You know,” she said, “we’re all going to be sick one day. I want the nurses that are taking care of me to be top drawer. I want the whole profession to be top drawer.”

That passion explains why Tuggle also is on the nursing faculty at the University of Louisville, where she goes through critical care cases with senior nursing students. “I don’t do that job because it pays so well, because it doesn’t,” she said. “I do it because it’s like something to give back to the profession: get these people jazzed and excited about what they’re going to do.”

As for what she is going to do, “My husband and I want to one day buy a big, obnoxious RV and be just like country folk traveling around the country. We know America is a beautiful country and we haven’t seen all of it. I love to go into little quaint villages and talk to the locals.”

Wherever she travels, as a lecturer or a tourist, she will always carry the story of her biggest triumph. It goes back to her hospital days in Washington when the director of nursing who was interviewing her for an educator position, “so rudely told me that a master’s degree and a quarter will buy you a cup of coffee.” Tuggle’s indignation was instant: “How dare you! You’re a nurse. Don’t say things like that to me. You’re supposed to promote nursing, not downgrade my achievements.”

Later, that same manager had to sign paperwork for some of the hospital’s nurses to attend one of Tuggle’s classes. “Seeing her name on there just gave me a thrill,” Tuggle said. “That was like the ultimate.”

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.