Making A Difference: An Occasional Series Profiling North Idaho’S Community Leaders Healing Touch Nic Nurse Gives Care And Refuge To Students In Need

A hint of soothing lavender escapes from the exam room as Linda Michal opens the door to peek in.

Candles burn inside, softly illuminating wall posters showing the body’s trigger points and connections from the feet to the vital organs.

“Aromatherapy,” Michal explains as nurse practitioner Pat DeSmet prepares the room for her next patient. “We often have lavender candles going for us. They help with stress.”

These rooms aren’t in a fancy health club. They’re in North Idaho College’s Health Services Center, which Michal runs with medical precision and Mother Teresa compassion.

“She’s a great mentor,” DeSmet says. “I love working here. I can introduce students to acupuncture. Linda’s so open-minded and tolerant.”

Under Michal’s guidance, NIC’s health center has evolved into a refuge for students with any problem. She medicates, educates and counsels, massages, listens and explains.

She helps struggling students analyze their lifestyles and directs abused students to support systems. Her patients suffer from stuffed noses, sexual assault and psoriasis, infections, anorexia and allergies.

Michal offers few quick fixes.

“People get sick when they’re under stress,” she says. “I’ve always had a holistic point of view. All the pieces of the puzzle tie in.”

Her approach pleases her co-workers. They’ve voted Michal NIC Employee of the Year twice during her 11 years at the school.

“Linda is one of the most caring, grounded people,” says Connie Dawson, a financial aide in NIC’s Student Services. “She knows how to make you admit you aren’t capable of doing it all. She’s way more than a nurse.”

Michal is everything she believes a nurse should be - medical examiner, counselor, diagnostician and teacher.

A master’s level degree earned her the title of nurse practitioner. It has given her the freedom to dispense health care her way.

“Basically I’m an old hippie,” she says, laughing. “While I can work in the system, sometimes the system makes me crazy.”

Her gray-white hair flows to her shoulders and she wears loose clothes and comfortable shoes. At 53, she’s as unconcerned with appearances as she was as a child growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, with her younger brother and sister.

“My parents raised us to be accepting of other people,” she says.

Nursing was a natural for her, although Michal envisioned a career as a lab technician.

“I really liked science,” she says. “But Mom had always wanted to be a nurse. And people would come to me with their problems.”

It was the mid-1960s and three years of nursing school in a local hospital cost the same as one year of college. Michal practiced her training in the surgical care and intensive care recovery unit and the charity ward.

Both awakened her to her calling.

“I became aware that these people’s lives were tough,” she says. “People with no access to health care would let themselves get so sick before they’d come in. I was drawn to taking care of people of any economic status.”

Her impatience with hospital politics motivated her to finish her training in college. Hospital-based nursing diploma programs were on their way out. Michal wanted a bachelor’s degree.

She enrolled at Kent State in 1970. The politically active campus immediately enlarged her protected view of the world. After her best friend was killed in Vietnam, Michal began to question the status quo.

She took experimental classes that taught her to challenge the system. Before she graduated, she married and moved to Denver, Colo.

Denver was another learning experience. Michal worked in burn care and intensive care, then evaluated patients for a detoxification program while she finished her degree.

“I learned a whole lot about a segment of the population I had never dealt with,” she says. “These were street people. They lived in boxes.”

A new nursing practitioner program caught her interest in the mid-1970s. Nurse practitioners could diagnose and treat most of the acute ailments that send people to doctors’ offices. Professionally, they fell halfway between doctors and nurses and offered the public lower-cost health care.

“I was tired of seeing people die in intensive care,” Michal says. “I wanted to make an impact at the other end.”

With her new certificate, Michal found her niche in neighborhood clinics that offered family care. She practiced in Denver, then moved on to a clinic for migrant workers in Payette, Idaho.

“I loved the migrants,” she says. The town was so small, patients sometimes showed up at her house. “They were so grateful for anything you’d do.”

A visit to the labor camps opened her mind even more. The overflowing toilets and fetid water appalled her. She’d told migrant patients at the clinic to refrigerate medication, but found they had no refrigeration.

“It was quite an awakening,” she says. “I realized my job was not to make them be like me, but to help them make the best decisions for their lives.”

Her husband’s job took her to Boise in 1980, just as the AIDS epidemic began to bloom. Michal signed on with the health district. She offered family planning, well-child check-ups and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases in rural areas.

She gave birth to a still-born daughter and lost a son to sudden infant death syndrome. Between the two, Michal gave birth to a healthy daughter, Ana. Strong friendships pulled her through.

When AIDS patients began trickling into her office in 1985, instinct told Michal to stick with them.

“I learned about a whole other aspect of society,” she says. “But it was another affirmation for me - how human needs are human needs are human needs.”

She tried to educate the public through the media and speaking engagements. She counseled and treated. The deaths of her patients hurt.

“I do grief well,” she says.

But she was committed to helping these patients that society wanted to ignore.

“I felt I had a responsibility to stand up for them because I could,” she says. “As a married, heterosexual person, people would listen to me.”

The job ended in 1989 when Michal’s husband decided to leave Boise. They settled in Coeur d’Alene and divorced a year later. By then, Michal was running NIC’s Health Services Center and volunteering weekly at Coeur d’Alene’s free clinic, now the Dirne Community Health Clinic.

NIC offered Michal a chance to mold her own program. She offered acute care with an addendum.

“Students need to understand the health care system and the impact health has on their ability to succeed at school,” she says. “I’m willing to ask them the hard questions.”

She offers Western care and alternatives - acupuncture, energy work, massage, aromatherapy. She advises NIC’s Gay/Straight Alliance and encourages patients to remember that their spiritual needs contribute to wellness.

“She’s the ideal person for that program,” says Sarah McLain, a friend and school counselor. “She’s willing to go to bat for people, advocate for health. She promotes good choices, but she’s not judgmental.”

Michal decided to tend to her own health this year. She began running a few miles every day and spending quiet time in her favorite cedar grove near Prichard. Her lean face shows the 25 pounds she’s lost.

She meets monthly with two close women’s groups. They’ve helped her through the recent deaths of her parents and this year’s departure of Ana to college.

“I looked at what I needed to do to become a fuller expression of who I am, and I’m doing it,” Michal says. “I’m probably in the best place now I’ve been in in my whole life.”