Gallaher worked the night shift at Coosa Valley Medical Center in Alabama – her preference, her son said, so she could mentor younger nurses. In the hospital she is known as ‘Miss Betty’. She loved being their soundboard, personal therapist and ‘work mom’.
She will make sure that everyone she has worked with is fed every night. She cared for her patients in the same way she cared for her family and her co-workers, who became family themselves. According to her loved ones, she was everyone’s favorite nurse.
So when the Covid 19 pandemic began in March, Gallaher’s concerned associates asked her to stay home for her safety.
But sitting back was not like her. She knew her colleagues and the community needed her, so she continued to work until Covid-19 fired her in December.
Gallaher died on January 10, one day before her 79th birthday, of Covid-19 in the same hospital where she had worked much of her career.
“She did not do it to get up,” her son Carson Grier jr. Said. “She did it, because that’s who she was – that’s her calling.”
She was a dedicated nurse and mentor
Gallaher was a nurse for most of her life. She believed it was her lifelong duty to care for her patients and to guide her younger colleagues, said Grier, a basketball coach and high school instructor.
“That was her goal and plan for her life,” Grier told CNN. “And she lived it daily.”
“We all worked with Betty now,” Terrell said. “I could never make her understand how much everyone loves her.”
One of the parts she liked best was working with young nurses who were sometimes 50 years younger than her, such as the Coosa Valley ER nurse and study leader Nikki Jo Hatten.
“Betty is the kind who worries about you as much as a nurse just as much as a patient,” Hatten told CNN. “She’s going to stop you while you’re busy, just to make sure you’re OK.”
Gallaher knew everyone’s names in the ER, plus the names of their spouses, children and pets, Hatten said. She arrives with a bag of burgers to eat for anyone who forgot to bring a meal along for their 12-hour shift. She will hold your hand and wrap you in a warm blanket if you need it. She showed the same love to her colleagues as to her family and children.
“She was the remedy for an anxiety attack,” Hatten said.
She worked in the ER until Covid-19 killed her
Miss Betty was not afraid to work on the front lines of a disaster. She was working as a supervisor at a hospital in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina knocked out power and stranded many of her associates.
A few years after the hurricane in 2005, she told her son she was retiring. When he asked her what she was going to do next, she said she would return to Coosa Valley, where Terrell had worked his way up to director of the emergency department, and return as an ER nurse.
“She wanted to return to the everyday worries of the emergency,” Grier said. “She did it until it was her last days.”
In March, her co-workers tried to persuade her to put out the pandemic. According to Hatten, the 78-year-old returned home from work after a day or two to resume her night shift.
“She could not stand it,” Hatten said. “She missed coming to work. That’s what she lived for.”
On December 19, Hatten notes that the typically tireless miss. Betty was short of breath during her rounds. Hatten suggested that Gallaher be looked after after her shift ended, but Gallaher pulls up her symptoms as exhaustion.
The next day, Emergency brought Gallaher to the hospital, though Hatten did not call, Hatten said – they looked at her out of concern. She tested positive for Covid-19, and she will remain in Coosa Valley until she dies.
Even when she was confined to her hospital bed, Gallaher’s concern was about the well-being of her colleagues. On New Year’s Eve, she called Terrell and asked him to buy pizza for the ER staff with her debit card as a thank you. She refused to take her caregivers to a Birmingham hospital – Hatten said she was joking that she would have no one to style her hair.
Hatten, Terrell and their colleagues tried to keep Gallaher comfortable and busy. After walking around the entire hospital, Hatten stopped at Gallaher’s room in the intensive care unit and drew with dry subjects on her door or put on PPE to show photos of her dog from Gallaher.
Miss Betty was afraid to die alone in the ICU, Hatten said. At the end of her life, her working family made sure she was surrounded by people who loved her.
“The day she did die, almost all of our ER staff filled that room,” Hatten said. “It was not like we wanted to see her go, but I’m glad we had to be there.”
Remember Miss Betty
Hatten’s shift is quieter than usual without Miss Betty being there. If the silence becomes too sad, Hatten and her colleagues will exchange ‘Betty stories’ or repeat the funny jokes she would make. It is therapeutic, she said.
“She was the glue of our ER, or the ER matriarch,” she said. “It feels like we lost our mother.”
Gallaher’s legacy was well known in Sylacauga, but Hatten wanted to share Miss Betty with the world. Therefore, she makes a TikTok dedicated to Gallaher, a compilation of short cuts by the 78-year-old nurse who radiates radiance with her colleagues.
“We did not want her to be forgotten,” Hatten said. “Everyone deserves a Betty in their hospital, and we wanted to share ours.”
Grier likes to remember his mother as she appears in Hatten’s TikTok – smiling, playful, always with a bag of food in hand. He believes that if his mother had had the chance to do her life again, knowing how it would end, she would have done it exactly the same way.
“There was only one way she knew how to live, and that was to help others,” he said. “I hope I can say I lived my life the way I wanted to live it.”
Terrell would preach at Gallaher’s funeral before it was postponed; Grier tested positive for Covid-19 a few days before the service, although he is now recovering. Giving the eulogy would be easy and impossible, Terrell said – easily because Gallaher secured her own legacy in the care she showed to others, and impossible because he loved her so much and missed her so much.
Before she died, Gallaher texted Terrell that she would eventually retire when she recovered from her illness. The couple liked to relax by painting acrylic statues – cows were her favorite to paint.
Gallaher could never retire, and Terrell never painted one last time with her. He knew she would never slow down in life, and so he could now imagine her in bliss painting paintings while the people she touched carried on her legacy of kindness.