Larkin has seen much change

By LISA SIMPSON STRANGE

GLASGOW — Nancy Larkin was 23 when she began working as a medical lab technician at a clinic in Knoxville, Tenn. That was 60 years ago.

Today, she fits patients with cardiac monitors and checks pacemakers, downloading the information onto her office computer at Cardiology Associates of Southern Kentucky.

The 83-year-old Larkin has seen an amazing evolution in medicine during her lifetime. When she started her career, there was no penicillin, only sulfa drugs. There were no modern diagnostic tests or equipment. They used live rabbits in the laboratory to perform pregnancy tests and guinea pigs to check for tuberculosis. Vaccines were made one at a time for individual patients using cultures from throat swabs.

She remembers testing almost 1,000 young men who came down out of the mountains of Kentucky into Tennessee in the early 1950s on their way to fight in Korea. She also tested the men out of the coal mines whose lungs were filled with black dust.

Larkin received her medical certification in 1945 and moved to Knoxville with her husband, Joe, who was a civil engineer on the L&N; Railroad. They relocated to Louisville a few years later and she worked at Jewish Hospital, which at that time was “the size of T.J. Samson” Community Hospital. She worked in the morgue there, taking dictation and assisting in autopsies. She also learned to take x-rays.

After that, she and Joe moved to Glasgow and started a family. Options were limited for women then, so Larkin left her job behind to stay home and raise their five children.

She rejoined the medical world nearly 30 years later, after the children were grown, taking a position with cardiologist Dr. Jim Whiteside when he opened his office in Glasgow.

Larkin said the biggest change in medicine during her career has been the technology.

“Everything has gone to computers. Instead of written (patient) records, they’re put on the computer now,” she said. “All the information off the monitors and the pacemaker checks are on the computer. You just have to keep up with the changes.”

Change doesn’t seem to be slowing Larkin down at all. She still works five days a week, eight or more hours a day and has no plans for retirement anytime soon.

“Work keeps your mind active and I have no desire to live out my life in a nursing home doing nothing,” she said recently after being named the 2008 Outstanding Older Worker for Kentucky by Experience Works. She traveled to Washington, D.C., to accept her award. She and Joe have also made recent trips both to Alaska and the Panama Canal. She said she likes to stay busy and enjoys taking trips and working with coworkers and the many patients who she likes.

Larkin sees an average of six patients a day, fitting them with 24-hour Holter monitors or two-week event monitors, she said. She also conducts pacemaker workshops and checks batteries and the equipment to make sure everything is working properly. She is responsible for downloading the information off the monitors when patients return the next day or after a couple of weeks, as well.

She said she has a special rapport with her older patients.

“They tell me things they won’t tell someone younger,” she said. “They (staff members) tend to be in a little bit of a hurry sometimes and don’t talk to the patients as much.”

Larkin may take her time when it comes to her patients, but she shows no signs of slowing down when it come to her work. The hours may be long sometimes and there are always changes to keep up with, but there are certain benefits too.

One change she doesn’t seem to mind is now Joe fixes dinner on the days she works.

“I tell him I’ll cook on the weekends,” she said.