When the March of Dimes (OK) announced their 2024 Nurse of the Year Awards Finalists, it didn’t shock Mark and Lisa Watson that their daughter, Emily Watson, an RN and House Supervisor at Bethany Childrens Health Center, was amongst the top nurses in the state. Then when Emily was announced as the winner in her work category they couldn’t be more excited or proud of her accomplishments.

“Emily is a third-generation nurse and has continued our family tradition of healthcare service,” Lisa Watson said. “My mother, Joy Hamburger, had graduated as a registered nurse in 1952 from St. Anthony Hospital School of Nursing and worked for a plastic surgeon. My dad was the first and only anesthesia resident at St. Anthony Hospital in the early 1950s.

“Thirty years later I graduated from the same St. Anthony’s Hospital School of Nursing in 1982, while my older sister, Lynn Beam, graduated from the University Of Oklahoma School Of Nursing that same year. Nursing seemed to just run in our family.

“In 2013, my daughter Emily earned a full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma City University’s Kramer School of Nursing and graduated Magna Cum Laude in 2017. The St. Anthony Hospital School of Nursing became affiliated with OCU the year after I graduated, which essentially makes Emily our third generation to graduate from the same nursing program.”

Although Emily came from a long line of nursing, there was a time when she was younger that she wanted to become a preacher, like her father. She told her dad she was going to be “a cool preacher” with a snow cone machine and swimming pool in her church, but her dreams were sadly crushed when her dad informed her that a church simply couldn’t have a swimming pool inside.

“Though her snow cone idea was a cool idea, I wasn’t sure how well she would do as a pastor,” Mark Watson said. “When we moved to Locust Grove our son Steven was involved with karate and then Emily got involved and earned the nicknames ‘The Methodist Mauler’ and ‘Chainsaw’ by her two coaches. Basically, when her coaches told her to fight she just went in and wouldn’t stop, chopping up her competition. In fact, they often would have to put their hands on her head to push her back and keep her from jumping the gun. We didn’t let her go very far in that sport because she took it a little too seriously.

“By this time we were moving again and both our children got involved with band. Our son played the trombone and the band director wanted Emily to play the trombone too but she said that she was not playing the same instrument her brother played. That’s when she was introduced to the French horn and she learned to play it beautifully.

“Pretty much throughout high school, music began to take over her life and she won all kinds of competitions. She even won the Jon Philips Sousa Band Award which recognizes top students in high school with superior musicianship and outstanding dedication to music. Then her senior year she got to travel with the Ambassadors of Music in Oklahoma to Europe just like her brother had his senior year. She even got an extension to Greece. However, when Emily turned down a full-ride scholarship to East Central University provided by the music department to pursue nursing at OCU, her music director thought she had missed her calling and was giving up on her gift.

“I just think she saw too many generations of strong women who were always helping people and she wanted to be that same strong, independent woman like her mother and grandmother. Nursing was just in her blood. Once she graduated from the nursing program and started working with children, she found her real passion for people and her calling which makes me proud as a dad and pastor.

“At Emily’s pinning ceremony, she was pinned with her grandmother’s pin from when she had graduated from St. Anthony’s 65 years prior. Though her Mimi had passed away in 2002, the pin symbolized the generational connection between all three of these strong women and three generations of registered nurses, compassionate about their career choice and others. So when she was chosen in her field as Nurse of the Year, her mother and I couldn’t have been prouder and we know her Mimi was cheering her on from heaven’s sidelines too.”

Nurse of the Year in her field.