After JoAnn Walker passed out in high school at the sight of blood, she figured she would have to give up her longtime dream of becoming a nurse. “I didn’t think I could handle it,” she said. But years later, while working as a CNA and raising her five children in Lovell, JoAnn decided to give it a shot — enrolling in the nursing program at Northwest College. “After five kids, you can handle a lot more,” she said. As she balanced a full slate of classes in the mid-1990s and motherhood after a divorce, JoAnn sometimes asked her kids to help her study. “They hated that, because I would have them ask me questions,” she recalled with a laugh. “I just thought, there’s no way that anybody [in my family] is going to be a nurse.”

Yet JoAnn’s love of caring for others appears to have made a significant impression on her children: Four of the five now work in healthcare. Two of her children — Dustin Smith and Crystal (Smith) Stewart — followed even more closely in their mom’s footsteps, as they also graduated from Northwest College’s nursing program. “I’m pleasantly surprised that they wanted to be nurses, but I’m not going to take credit for it,” JoAnn said, though Crystal is quick to say she should.

Over the years, JoAnn, Crystal and Dustin have worked together — first at North Big Horn Hospital in Lovell and then at West Park Hospital in Cody, where they all worked in the operating room. “They couldn’t call me ‘Mom’ in the OR,” JoAnn said. Since they had another coworker named JoAnn, Dustin and Crystal called their mom by her surname, Walker. While the three work well together, it could be a challenge sometimes, JoAnn said. “You have to differentiate between coworker and mother,” she said. Dustin added, “She became everyone’s mother, so it was easier that way.”

Crystal said her story about how she got into nursing is similar to her mom’s. She worked as a CNA, and also went through a divorce. She thought about becoming a nurse, and Dustin said he would start taking classes with her at NWC. “So we kind of started together … I’ve been doing it ever since and don’t regret it at all,” Crystal said. Crystal graduated from the NWC nursing program in 2008.

For Dustin, his journey toward a career in nursing included working as a scrub tech and CNA while also taking nursing prerequisites. He moved around a bit, living in Florida and Utah. Dustin worked at the Intermountain Medical Center in Murray, Utah, which is a training facility for an academic nursing program. but he still faced a two-year wait to get in, even with all his prereqs. “... it got a little discouraging,” Dustin said. He moved back to Wyoming, and because his mom was an alumna, he received in-state tuition at NWC. Following graduation in 2013, Dustin started taking classes through the University of Wyoming and received his bachelor’s degree.

Dustin’s wife, Samantha (Maraviov) Smith, is another alumna of the NWC nursing program, graduating in 2014. While Dustin’s and Samantha’s time at NWC overlapped, their paths didn’t really cross until Samantha was doing her clinicals and Dustin was working in the Cody OR alongside Crystal and JoAnn.  Dustin and Samantha got married in 2017.

With four nurses now in the family, “there’s a commonality that you just understand,” JoAnn said. “It’s great to be in a family of nurses,” Samantha said. “We do have some interesting conversations at the dinner table on occasion, but we also have a shared calling. We all love what we do and love taking care of people in need.” They support one another and also share work stories from the hospital — which may make others feel squeamish. “The in-laws hate our family dinners,” Crystal joked.

In recent years, the NWC graduates’ journeys in healthcare have taken them to different places. JoAnn is now the operating room manager at North Big Horn Hospital in Lovell, while Dustin and Samantha both work at Powell Valley Healthcare. Crystal is a travel nurse based out of Georgia, where she moved three years ago. The family is thankful to have gotten their start at NWC. “I don’t think any of us would have been nurses if it hadn’t been for Northwest,” JoAnn said. Larger schools are so competitive and hard to get into, with long waiting lists, she said. At NWC, they didn’t have to wait to get a great education at an affordable price. “Our instructors were fantastic,” JoAnn said. “I felt it was a really high quality program.” To keep current on their certifications, they’ve continued to study together. “So it’s kind of a continuing support as well, because of that commonality,” Dustin said. “We’ve all got to do this, so let’s do it together.”