DONNA JOHNSON RETIRING FROM HI-DESERT MEDICAL CENTER AFTER 51 YEARS

Gas was 31 cents a gallon, the mini-skirt was introduced, and the “Sound of Music” was the year’s top grossing film; it was 1965 and twenty-two-year-old Donna Johnson began working at Hi-Desert Memorial Hospital in Yucca Valley. Assignment report Mike Lipsitz picks up the story from there…
Tomorrow, Hi-Desert Medical Center marks Donna Johnson’s 51 years of service with a small celebration in the Helen Gray Education Center. November 5 is officially the last day for Johnson who still works full time. Presently, Johnson is the hospital’s occupational health coordinator, but she was an emergency room nurse for the bulk of her career. Johnson’s history at the hospital spans a lifetime of medical advances, social change, and area growth; she is credited with helping establish paramedic service as the first mobile intensive care unit nurse here. Among her most memorable experiences was a stint working as a life support nurse at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, although the bulk of her skills there, she says, were spent treating sunburn and diarrhea. Johnson says she looks forward to retirement but will really miss the people she has worked with; and what’s next for Donna Johnson? Read the book, she says, it will be called, “Oh my God!”