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Nurse Kept Patients Laughing

FORT WORTH — On the off chance that Ethel Ansley didn’t light up the room with her smile, she usually had a backup: tiny flashing lights on her earrings, rings that lit up, glow-in-the-dark shoelaces.

One way or another, the nurse with the offbeat scrubs saw to it that she brightened the day for the hundreds of patients she cared for through the years at a Fort Worth dialysis center.

“She had a funny Christmas top, red shoes with a red shoelace on one foot and a green one on the other, Christmas ornament earrings. She even had a red headband with a spring on it and mistletoe attached that would wave back and forth, and patients would give her a kiss because of the mistletoe,” said her sister, Ray Bridget Moore of Arlington.

“She wanted to make them laugh, take their minds off what they were going through.”

When Mrs. Ansley was diagnosed with lung cancer in May 2007, she stayed on the job as long as she could — until several months ago. But the cancer spread to her back and brain, and finally, she felt too bad after rounds of radiation and chemotherapy to work.

She died Tuesday morning at a Fort Worth hospice, with friends and family nearby.

Mrs. Ansley was born Oct. 20, 1951, in Fort Worth. She graduated from Carter-Riverside High School in 1970 and from the nursing program at John Peter Smith Hospital in 1977.

Her nickname was “the queen of dialysis,” her colleagues said.

Licensed vocational nurse Sebrina Wiltse of Whitney said she met Mrs. Ansley at the dialysis center on Jan. 4, 1980, when “I was fresh out of school, young and timid. I picked her out and said, ‘I want to be her friend.’

“Plain ol’ just wasn’t good enough for her,” Wiltse said. “She made the most of everything and really made a difference in kind of a dreary place. . . . Everything she wore had light or glitter, pretty patterns. Nothing boring, nothing plain.”

Mrs. Ansley sometimes posed a challenge for her supervisors, among them Kay Sharp of Hurst.

“She was a little outside the box” — particularly when she decided to dress as a fish bowl, wearing clear garbage bags filled with live fish, Sharp said.

“But the patients said that sometimes she was the only thing that made them smile during the four hours” of dialysis, she said..

Mrs. Ansley was a member of Riverside Baptist Church and loved visiting antique malls and going fishing and boating with her husband and children.

Near the end of her life, she still looked on the bright side.

“She’s always been a little on the heavy side, and she lost lots and lots of weight during her treatments,” Moore said.

“The doctor finally said, ‘Now Ethel, I know you want to keep going, but maybe you should consider quality of life’ ” and cease treatments, Moore said.

“She was like a petulant child, saying ‘If you insist.’ But when he told her she’d get her appetite back, her eyes lit up and she said, ‘Oh, thank you. It’s good I didn’t throw away my fat clothes.’ ”

Her funeral was Thursday, with burial in Mount Olivet Cemetery in Fort Worth.

Survivors: Husband, Pat Ansley; sons, Acie McCullough and Harold “Rip” McCullough; sisters, Ray Bridget Moore and Marilynne Reeves.

(c) YellowBrix 2008

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