INSIDE ON CAMPUS

The sky’s the limit for graduating nursing student

BY NANCY NEFF

Nurse practitioner candidate Kimberly Miller has pretty much always had lofty ambitions.

As a STARflight nurse for Brackenridge Hospital, she was a member of a small medical team that whirled off to car wrecks, boating accidents, drownings and shootings in a 10-county area. She now has her own single-engine plane and is part of a group of pilots who provide free flights for patients with disabilities or who are terminally ill.

Kimberly Miller
- Photo by Marsha Miller

"We try and do nice things for people, many of whom are in a bad way," said Miller of the 100 MPH Club.

A registered nurse for 22 years, Miller receives her master’s degree this spring in the family nurse practitioner concentration. She spent most of those years as an emergency room nurse at Brackenridge and plans to return on a part-time basis after graduation.

"Being an emergency room nurse — you either love it or hate it. And, I love it," said Miller.

Work as a STARflight and emergency room nurse has given Miller enormous autonomy and critical decision-making medical experience that will allow her to make a smooth transition to family nurse practitioner, she said.

A nurse practitioner can write prescriptions and performs many health care tasks customarily done by a physician.

Miller also is interested in hospice and nurse oncology and has worked as a bereavement counselor and a registered nurse in Brackenridge’s intensive care and pediatric intensive care units.

"Nursing has given me the opportunity to excel in today’s world," she said. "I have developed compassion, empathy and advocacy skills and have always had choices in nursing careers. No other profession affords this much opportunity."

Miller earned her Federal Aviation Administration private pilot license in 1997 and flies her late father’s Cessna 182. Her father had built an apartment at their Lago Vista hangar and Miller lived there until she married her flight instructor.  They married, in fact, at the hangar.

Before enrolling in the master’s program, Miller briefly worked at Hospice Austin. It was there she got the idea of using the airplanes to assist hospice patients and others. Miller got to know a veteran at Christopher House, who was a navigator in World War II. He knew she was a pilot and expressed interest in flying.

"I gathered my best flying buddies," said Miller. "We took him out one day — his oxygen tank in tow — and gave him the ride of his life." One of the planes the patient got to fly in was Miller’s husband’s vintage 1946 Cessna 140. The veteran died two weeks later.

Members of Miller’s flying club have flown a child with cystic fibrosis, rescued a trapped dog in West Texas and given rides to Boy Scouts and other interested young people. They would like to work again with the hospice, perhaps flying patients home, if outside Austin, for the last time.

On occasion, Miller’s Labrador retriever, Gus, goes along for the ride.

Like many, Miller has had others in her family who were nurses. Her great aunt, whom she considered to be more of a grandmother, was director of nurses in Madisonville, Texas.

"I attribute my career to her," said Miller. "She put herself through nursing school, rose through the ranks and lived to be a very old nurse."

"Kim is a professional who balances both ethical and moral decision-making in caring for patients," said School of Nursing Assistant Professor Margaret Taylor. "She can clearly advance an argument for or against certain clinical decisions, the sign of a true patient advocate."