Her husband jokingly says Winnie Lehman has “worn out one hospital and is working on a second.” She giggles as she tells tales on herself, but after working at essentially the same job in the same town for more than 37 years, the registered nurse can only shrug and offer a shy grin.
Fact is, when she walked off her final shift at the Slave Lake Health Care Centre at 7:30 a.m. on Sept. 29, she was the longest-serving nurse at the facility. (Another nurse who could have jockeyed for position, Gail Robertson, was on staff when Winnie arrived, but later changed roles and moved to the administrative wing of the facility.)
“I’ve seen many administrators and staff members come and go,” she says, though she has never tried to add their numbers. But in a feigned defence, Winnie insists that in all those years, she never once had a full time job.
“It was always part time and casual,” shifts that she was doing, she says.
That said, however, she still managed or rack up between 800 and 1,200 hours every year – or about half the hours of a full time. (And then there was the husband, two sons and a daughter at home.)
Winnie was born in Topeka, Indiana and grew up on a farm in that area. After she graduated from high school she headed to a Mennonite college specializing in liberal arts. There she took a four year Bachelor of Science degree, graduating as a Registered Nurse. While she was there she met and married Aaron Lehman, a strapping young education student from upstate New York.
“I was the older woman,” she says with a giggle, admitting that she had to wait a year for her husband to join her on the graduates’ role. Shortly after, the couple headed north - way north - to northern Alberta, in particular, Sandy Lake to do some voluntary service for the church. With his freshly stamped Bachelor of Science degree in biology, Aaron headed to the front of the class at the community’s school, teaching Grades 1 through 8.
“I wasn’t employed as a nurse,” at the time, says Winnie. There was a municipal nurse who flew into the community once a month to administer vaccinations and the like. And if medical know-how was needed when the nurse wasn’t around, Winnie was invited to put her skills to work, which often meant deciding if the patient needed to be flown out.
And it was in that position that Winnie experienced one of the most memorable trips of her career. “Once I went five miles by dogsled in the middle of the night to see a sick teenager,” she recalls. The family lived in a clearing in the middle of the bush, and the child’s father - a pilot - needed to know if the illness warranted a flight out the next morning.
And life in Sandy Lake held other jobs for Winnie too.
“There were VSers (volunteer service individuals) all over Northern Alberta,” she recalls. They had no telephone service, but had regular radio contact with their counterparts in Lac La Biche, Anzac (near Fort McMurray), Fort Chipewyan, Calling Lake and other northern hamlets. The Wagner station near Slave Lake was one of the main radio centers, she recalls, and while it didn’t have any VS members, Winnie was often called on to ‘bounce’ messages between Wagner and Wabasca units when weather interrupted the transmission.
The couple left Alberta the following year to embark on their second VS ‘mission’. That one, far to the south, had them serving as house parents at a boarding school for brain-injured children near Philadelphia.
But after another couple of stints in Michigan, Aaron’s successful completion of a Masters’ degree in biology and the arrival of son Carson and daughter Anita, the couple’s thoughts drifted north. “We decided that before putting down roots anywhere, we’d go back to Alberta for two or three years,” says Winnie with a grin.
So in mid-1968, Aaron answered an employment ad by the High Prairie School Division. And after an interview and job offer over the phone, the family headed back north. They arrived as ‘landed immigrants’ in Slave Lake, Aug. 30, 1968.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
With her husband busy at school, Winnie settled into her role of Mom – at least until some members of the community discovered she was an RN and promptly hunted her down. A few months later — Apr. 1, 1969 to be exact — she began a part time job at the recently opened Slave Lake General hospital. And in 1970 the couple’s youngest child, Keith, was born.
Winnie says over the years her duties were essentially the same. Unless, of course, she volunteered to accompany patients that were being transported to more specialized facilities – or in from the bush.
Her diary reveals that as early as October of 1969 she was ‘on board’ a station wagon that had been converted to transfer patients. That trip saw her assisting a patient that was being sent to High Prairie, but over the years she often found herself doing the same for patients being transported by land or air
In fact, she even went so far as to take Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) training offered by SAIT (the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) and taught at the hospital when the ambulance service was in its infancy.
“It’s so good to have the ambulance service with the EMTs and paramedics that we have these days.”
And while she was happy to return to her regular duties, it was one those patient transfers that provided one of the nurse’s more memorable experiences.
“I flew with the air ambulance to Chip(ewyan) Lake to pick up a pregnant 17-year-old,” she recalls. But the baby seemed to be in more of a rush than the plane would allow, “and (the teen) ‘delivered’ just as we landed” at the Slave Lake airport.
There are clearly many memories - and stories - packed into the diary that she’s kept since she was a mere 17 years old. There are the good, and the not-so-good. But the nurse who wears warmth and compassion like a heart on her sleeve chooses to remember the positive ones. (Or the good news/bad news scenarios like the flood in 1988 that saw Winnie helping move all the patients to the Elks hall, then C.J. Schurter School when rushing waters from the Sawridge Creek deposited half an inch of muddy silt throughout the hospital. On the positive side, the waters left no deaths in their wake – at least not in Slave Lake. That flood eventually led to the construction of a new hospital for Slave Lake almost a decade later.)
“I wanted to do things to make people feel better, to help people and to serve,” she says when asked why she chose nursing and continued reporting for duty for nearly 38 years. And patients and co-workers will say the very dedicated lady did all of the above - in spades. And in all that time took just one sick day – when she took her son to the doctor for a broken bone.
After all those years, “I’ll miss the people,” she says. But at the same time, the nurse who always threw her heart into even the simplest of jobs, says she let her license lapse so she won’t be tempted to work ‘just one more’ shift.
“I’ve enjoyed my years of nursing. And I thank Aaron for his support and understanding over the years when he’d have a sick child at home overnight while I was at the hospital looking after someone else’s sick child or taking off in an ambulance or plane to a (Northern) lake, or Edmonton. And thanks to our kids for putting up with a Mom going off working - again - and tolerating my grumpiness when I was tired.
“It’s been a wonderful job..and I’ll miss my contacts with staff and patients. “But it’s time to retire – not from life, but from nursing.”
Winnie says she and her husband will keep busy camping, traveling, gardening and reading. And of course, there are all those grandchildren to enjoy.

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