2 nurses: Her mom battled 1918 pandemic, she fights this one

SALINAS, Calif. (AP) — She’s 76 years old but nurse practitioner Sigrid Stokes is in no mood to retire.

Stokes is too busy working to save lives during a deadly pandemic, just as her mother did more than a century ago.

While the late Kristine Berg Mueller tended to those stricken by the deadly flu pandemic that swept around the world in 1918, Stokes is giving vaccinations to health care workers battling the coronavirus.

Mueller was a 14-year-old student in her native Norway when the flu pandemic hit. It eventually killed an estimated 50 million people, including some 675,000 in the United States, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

“And so she and a friend volunteered at the local hospital to help out in whatever way they could, which I would imagine would be things like feeding people, bathing people, you know, changing beds, whatever they could do,” Stokes said recently as she prepared to administer vaccines at Salinas Valley Memorial Hospital near her Northern California home.

Decades after the flu pandemic passed, Stokes' mother would tell her that was what had inspired her to become a nurse.

The family had no money to send her to nursing school, however, but an aunt in San Francisco agreed to take her in. She moved to the United States in 1923 and enrolled in a U.S. nursing program four years later.

Eventually she married and moved to Los Angeles, where Stokes' father ran a rental bookstore while her mother continued her nursing career.

Among her assignments was being called to movie studios from time to time to make sure child actors stayed safe and healthy while on set. Among the many photos of her mother, Stokes has one that she displays proudly of her in her uniform talking to child star Shirley Temple as both smile broadly.

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