Columbus St. Francis DeSales High School graduate Shelby Rice, Class of 2021, said her decision to become a nurse was inspired by her grandmother.
Maggie Thiel Berger graduated from Mount Carmel College of Nursing (MCCN) in 1960. Earlier this spring, her granddaughter, Rice, did the same.
Graduating 65 years apart, one MCCN graduate is beginning her nursing career and the other has long since retired.
Berger spent years working as a nurse in the operating room (OR) at Mount Carmel St. Ann’s Hospital in Westerville. She also worked at the former Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital in Columbus and as a scrub nurse in the OR with an orthopedic surgeon.
As Rice contemplated her future career, she desired a path similar to her grandmother’s, seeing the various opportunities it presented. “That’s why I originally went into nursing,” she said.
For Berger, her reason for nursing was more linear.
“I was just a senior in high school, I think, and I thought, well, maybe I’ll be a nun,” she recalled. “My oldest brother said, ‘Maggie, I think that’s a bad idea.’
“I said, ‘Well, what else could I do? I guess I’ll be a nurse.’”
After graduating from Columbus Holy Rosary High School, which later closed in 1966, she chose the latter option and attended Mount Carmel.
Berger, who hails from the south side of Columbus, was raised in a devout Catholic family. She grew up in former Columbus St. Leo parish, which was suppressed in 1999 before becoming an oratory in 2020 staffed by the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest.
“I owe a lot to Mount Carmel and my Catholic faith and my upbringing,” Berger said.
She began her college days at Mount Carmel in the school’s chapel.
“I went to Mass every morning, 6 o’clock, and then went to work,” she recalled. “It was just part of the routine, and it was so easy because, being Catholic, it really helped.”
Mount Carmel School of Nursing, later MCCN, was founded by the Sisters of the Holy Cross in 1903 in Columbus.
It was a logical choice for Berger’s nursing education. However, little did she know, her granddaughter would make the same decision more than four decades later.
“It was really a thrill for me to have her be there, and then, she’s just blossomed,” Berger said.
Rice initially attended Ohio State University but transferred to MCCN her sophomore year of college.
Looking back, she can appreciate attending a smaller Catholic nursing school. Rice is currently completing nursing orientation at Mount Carmel St. Ann’s Hospital, where her grandmother worked decades earlier.
“Going to my nurse residency programs and events at the hospital, I’m always running into someone I know, and it just makes it less scary, to see familiar faces,” she explained. “It feels like we’re just in class.”
Berger, who resides at The Villas at Saint Therese in Columbus, might feel much the same way. She is one of five MCCN graduates living at The Villas, a Catholic assisted and independent living facility, who attended school together.
One alumna at the Villas, Rose Dete Murnane, and Berger were colleagues at Mercy Hospital. Rice now works with Murnane’s son, Dr. Alan Murnane, an obstetrician-gynecologist, in the labor and delivery department at Mount Carmel St. Ann’s.
Rice also worked with Murnane during nursing school in his office at Westar OB/GYN, which offers obstetric and gynecological care.
“It really feels so full circle,” Rice expressed. “I just feel more connected to nursing and to my grandma. I didn’t go into OR nursing, but we do go into the OR in labor and delivery.
“Every time I’m there, I feel like my grandma a little bit, and I can just imagine what (she) would say in certain situations … and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I get why we are so similar.’”
Beyond relationships formed through MCCN, Rice was exposed to the possibility of caring for more than a patient’s physical needs.
“It became super apparent to me that, naturally, there’s an alignment between Catholic values and nursing values. They just go hand in hand,” Rice said. “I feel like, having a Catholic background, it’s given a little bit more purpose to what we do.
“We can really look at a patient from a different perspective. I remember at Mount Carmel (College), it was really big: We’re treating mind, body, soul – not just, what can you do for the patient physically? But what can you do for them emotionally and spiritually?
“It’s really important, especially working in labor and delivery, to be in a Catholic hospital because they have respect for all human life.”
Rice works closely with the hospital’s chaplains. She acknowledged that pregnancies do not always end as desired. Witnessing chaplains minister to mothers and families in times of loss can be a beautiful experience, she noted.
When a patient loses a baby, Berger recalled from nursing school, “they taught us, if you see the products of conception – and they’re there – you bless and baptize them, and I did that once. I baptized that baby.”
Rice has had several experiences of praying with patients, regardless of their faith, at the hospital bedside.
She described being part of a woman’s birth story as a highlight of labor and delivery nursing, which also comes with extra pressure.
“That feels like a lot of weight on me because everyone remembers their story, and it’s not just another day for them,” she noted. “It’s a huge moment.”
Added pressures extend beyond the labor and delivery department. The nursing field has changed significantly since Berger’s time at St. Ann’s Hospital.
“They do much more,” she said of nurses today. “We never read any of the reports or anything when we were in school.
“There were only a few doctors, when I was in my early years of nursing, that could even read an EKG (electrocardiogram, a tool that records a heart’s electrical activity). They didn’t all do that.”
Rice, who began in July at St. Ann’s Hospital, is set to complete orientation around Thanksgiving. The training requirements have also intensified.
“We just didn’t do it,” Berger recalled. “You watched one, you did one and you’re it – putting down tubes, doing whatever. That was it.
“We didn’t know any better, so we just did it. It’s just the way it was.”
While nursing in 2025 has little resemblance to 1960, Berger is grateful that her granddaughter is continuing her legacy.
At Rice’s graduation ceremony earlier this year, she asked her grandmother to pin her.
MCCN graduates receive a pin for nursing. They are pinned by a person of their choosing at the ceremony – one tradition that does resemble 1960 Mount Carmel.
Berger, too, was pinned during her MCCN graduation. In addition to pinning her granddaughter this year, she gave Rice the nursing pin she received in 1960.
“I was thrilled,” Berger said of pinning her granddaughter. “I was glad to be well and be able to do that.”
“We were so excited,” Rice added. “It really made graduation feel so much more important. I felt like we were closing a circle, but then, it was the start of my journey in nursing.”
