By Abigail Wright
NKyTribune staff writer
The smell of freshly baked Mountain Dew cake still takes Terry Foster back to his childhood.
His mother, Mary Ruth Foster, was a night clerk at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, raising six boys in Taylor Mill. The cake became her signature dessert. If it was sitting uncovered in the kitchen, the boys knew it was fair game, and if it was covered, they would ask who died.
The recipe has endured through decades of birthdays, holidays and funerals, but it is not the only thing Mary Ruth passed on to her son. She also unknowingly introduced him to the place that would define his life’s work.
In 1973, at 14 years old, Foster began volunteering at St. Elizabeth, an attempt by his mother to get him out of the house during the long summer hours. What started as a teenager’s first volunteering position soon became the beginning of a career that, next year, will reach an extraordinary milestone: 50 years as an emergency nurse.
Now 68 and still living in his hometown of Taylor Mill, Foster has spent the past five decades caring for patients during some of the worst moments of their lives, and he has no intention of slowing down.
“There are tremendous highs and tremendous lows,” Foster said. “I still remember some patients and situations and stuff that you never will get over, but, oh my gosh, what a great ride it’s been. And I’m still riding, no plans to quit.”
Foster’s path into nursing was anything but predetermined. While volunteering in the emergency department, he encountered something that would not only surprise him, but change the course of his life forever.
“I had no idea a guy could be a nurse,” Foster said, recalling the first male nurse he had ever seen.
Watching the staff work quickly and compassionately through emergencies further cemented his future in nursing.
“I saw what nurses did, and I was in the ER as a 14-year-old, and probably saw things I shouldn’t have seen, but I was like, ‘I love this,’” Foster said. “And I just got bit by the bug, you know? So, that’s what sealed the deal.”
He officially joined St. Elizabeth as an employee in 1975 before graduating from Booth Memorial Hospital School of Practical Nursing in Covington in 1997. Additionally, he completed a master’s degree in critical-care and trauma nursing at the University of Cincinnati in 1997.
Over the years, Foster has served as a volunteer, ward clerk, staff nurse, charge nurse, clinical director and night supervisor, as well as critical-care nurse specialist for St. Elizabeth’s emergency departments since 1998.
Despite the long list of credentials that follow his name and a resume that includes more than 40 professional publications, over 5,000 lectures across all 50 states, national nursing awards and induction as a Fellow of the Academy of Emergency Nursing, Foster can still clearly remember the fear he felt walking into his first shift at the emergency department as if it were yesterday.
“I was scared to death,” Foster said. “I just remember thinking, I hope I can handle whatever comes in, because what I like (about the ER), but also what is a little stressful, is you don’t know what’s gonna come through the door.”
That uncertainty, he said, has never disappeared, but it is also what keeps emergency nursing meaningful because every patient arrives carrying a different story.
“It’s the worst day of their life, but it’s my responsibility to do what I can to make that better,” Foster said. “And if it’s saving them, certainly, that’s what we’re gonna try to do. But we’ve had some people that have come in that can’t be saved. I think to myself, well, we couldn’t save them, but I’m gonna make sure they have a peaceful and a dignified and a respectful death.”
Compassion, he believes, extends beyond medicine.
“I love the fact that I have been able to take care of people of every age, of every background, every ethnicity, a homeless person, or a CEO, intelligent, or has a lot of intellectual challenges, and I love that I can take care of them, and at some level, it’s communicated that I care about them,” Foster said.
Ironically, someone who nearly earned the title of “quietest” in his high school graduating class has become known for connecting effortlessly with strangers, something Foster jokingly calls the “nurse aura.”
“People will come up and just start talking to us (nurses) because they feel like there’s just a presence there or whatever. And sometimes these people have issues, or they’re challenged or things like that, but they feel comfortable with us,” Foster said.
That comfort often comes through humor, something Foster has developed a national reputation for in the medical world.
“It’s very respectful humor, not about anybody’s station in life, or age, or race, or ethnicity, or anything like that,” Foster said. “I try to decrease somebody’s anxiety. Like, sometimes, if I can tell a person’s really tense, and they need an IV in, I’ll say, ‘Thank you for letting me do that, I’ve always wanted to learn how.’”
His reputation as both an educator and storyteller eventually caught the attention of TLC’s “Untold Stories of the ER.”
About 15 years ago, producers of the show searched online for unusual emergency department cases. They came across one of Foster’s lectures and were immediately interested.
The producers left Foster an email while he was at work, which he assumed was a fellow nurse pulling a prank on him.
“I said, ‘I’m really sorry, I thought you were one of my friends playing a joke on me.’ And she was like, ‘What kind of friends do you have?’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s kind of what kind of friend have I been, also,’” Foster recalled of that first phone call with a producer.
The call turned out to be legitimate, and Foster became the first nurse ever featured on the physician-focused television series, recently completing filming his 11th episode.
Yet, he still “can’t stand” to watch himself on TV.
While Foster said he enjoys being on set, the most defining moments of his career came from within hospital walls.
He remembers the 1977 Beverly Hills Supper Club fire as the most horrific event he had witnessed up until the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I swear, I thought I was seeing the end of the world,” Foster said of COVID.
Patients died daily.
“And then you just went back and did it again the next day,” Foster said.
Remarkably, Foster never contracted COVID during the pandemic despite working on the front lines.
He credits much of his longevity to St. Elizabeth itself.
Having worked briefly within the Mercy hospital system for several years, Foster said the culture and “family atmosphere” at St. Elizabeth is what kept drawing him back.
St. Elizabeth President and CEO Garren Colvin often jokes that Foster has worked there so long he must have worked the night shift with Henrietta Cleveland, the woman who founded the hospital in 1861.
The joke resonates because generations of employees and patients know Foster by name, and he knows them too.
Rather than expressing frustration when familiar faces return to the emergency department, Foster just sees another opportunity to provide care for a person in need.
“Instead of saying, ‘Are you back here again?’ Foster said, ‘You know, it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m here to take care of you.”
That same compassion extends well beyond the hospital.
After his wife, Peggy, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1994 and passed away the following year, Foster fulfilled a promise she never had the chance to carry out.
She had wanted to organize an annual fundraiser for leukemia patients once she recovered.
Instead, Foster created the Peggy Foster Memorial Fund in her honor. The fund continues to provide wigs, hairpieces and other assistance for cancer patients and their families.
While Foster continues to work part-time at St. Elizabeth, he likes to say he’s full-time in everything else.
Foster volunteers with Covington’s Parish Soup Kitchen, breast cancer support organizations, Holy Cross Catholic Church, the St. Elizabeth Foundation as well as numerous charitable groups. During winter storms, local road crews know they can count on Foster to make them breakfast while they work long hours clearing icy streets.
“I feel like I have a gift to talk to people, relate to people and stuff,” Foster said. “If they can use me for a breast cancer support group, for the parish kitchen, for Go Pantry, anything like that I can help with or help advance that for somebody, I’m happy to do that.”
Nearly five decades after a teenage volunteer first walked into the emergency department, Foster still arrives with the same sense of purpose.
“It’s an incredibly rewarding career,” Foster said. “It’s something I have never regretted a day being a nurse. Are some days better than others? You better believe it. But I’ve never regretted it.”
As long as patients keep coming through the emergency department doors, the boy who discovered nursing while following his mother’s footsteps to St. Elizabeth intends to keep answering the call.
More information about the Peggy Foster Memorial Fund can be found here.