Pneumonia?

Take two of the brown pieces.

Headache?

Here’s two yellows.

Upset stomach?

A blue should settle that.

In the imaginary world of a 5-year-old girl in a one-room schoolhouse in the Russell Hill community in the early 1950s, there were few imagined illnesses a few pieces of M&Ms candy couldn’t cure.

Classmates were pretend patients. Eller Sircy was their imaginary nurse.

And there were few ailments she couldn’t cure with a bag of M&Ms.

These days, there’s nothing imaginary about the real ailments Sircy, now 64, treats every day as a nurse at Macon County General Hospital.

Sircy has been a nurse for 48 years, not counting her years handing out candy.

She marvels at the advances of modern medicine but said there’s no substitute for the human touch.

“There has never been a diagnostic tool as good as our hands, our eyes, our ears and our nose,” Sircy said. “I can sniff out strep throat or E. coli, because we actually did that. The old doctors made biscuit dough out of your belly. They examined you from head to toe.

“Now it’s a different ballgame. They essentially go in there and say ‘where are you hurting?’ And you say ‘it’s killing me right here and I’ve had indigestion for weeks.’ They don’t have to touch it. They do an ultrasound of your gallbladder. But there’s no test 100-percent accurate. If your patient is sick you know they’re sick and you need to take care of them. You can’t depend on tests.”

Sircy got her LPC license in 1968. She went to Hartsville in 1970 and stayed there until 1978, at which time she came to Lafayette. Eller left MCGH in 1992 – for Hartsville – but returned in 1999 and has been there since.

Sircy said she’ll continue nursing for as long as she can.

“I wish I had another 48 years to do it,” she said. “I never get tired of it.”

Occasionally, Sircy said she will hear young nurses say they’re burned out with nursing.

“I don’t know how you can get burned out,” Sircy said. “I learned something just the last night I worked from Dr. Ilia. You still learn every day, or are coming up with new stuff in medicine.

“They talk about space or the ocean, but the body is the most amazing thing. You think of the trillions of people in the world. None of us are alike. It’s fascinating to me.”

For Sircy, it’s been a remarkable 48-year nursing ride so far.

The story of how Eller Sircy became the nurse she is today begins back in that one-room schoolhouse in Russell Hill. Specifically, it happened during a Christmas program there.

“God called me to it when I was 5 years old,” Eller said. “I was sitting behind this big old pot-bellied stove when a voice just told me I was going to be a nurse.

“I never had to decide what I wanted to do, just how to get there. I never dreamed I would get there. We only had shoes in the winter time. We literally didn’t have shoes in the summer.”

Eller was born in Smith County, the eleventh of 14 children – nine girls, four boys – born to Henry and Mary Sircy.

Eller said her parents are the smartest two people she’s ever known, even though she said neither Henry nor Mary Sircy could write their own names.

“I hear people saying other people are stupid, or other people that are judgmental people,” Eller said. “Because they can’t read or write doesn’t make them stupid. They just never had the opportunity to go to school.”

Eller said her mother, Mary, was the best nurse and doctor she’s ever known. Mary once set one of her daughters’ arms back into place after it had been broken. Mary also made a brace out of sticks from the woods to help the arm heal.

“She fixed our cuts and took care of our pneumonia,” Eller said.

As for Eller’s dad, Henry, well, he could build just about anything.

“We were always the hog-killing site on Saturdays,” Eller said. “We killed about 21 hogs for people, because nobody could gut and cut the hogs out like my daddy.”

Eventually, Eller left home at age 15. She left to babysit for a close friend.

Shortly after, the friend was taking care of a woman who had an open fracture of her ankle. Eller’s nursing career was about to begin.

“During the day, while my friend was at work, I took care of this lady’s ankle,” Eller said. “When she went back for her checkup, the doctor wanted to know who took care of her. Then he asked me if I wanted a job.”

Eller’s dad signed the proper paperwork, and Eller was hired at the hospital.

She worked six nights a week at the hospital and was paid $48 twice a month. She also attended classes five days a week at Smith County High School.

“I did that for four and a half years for 88 hours a week,” Eller said.

She dropped out of high school near the end of her junior year, got her GED and then focused all her efforts on nursing.

And, in nursing terms, Eller Sircy is old school.

“All the antibiotics we have now have been invented since I’ve been nursing,” she said.

By age 19, Eller was doing X-rays and lab tests.

Somebody would come into the hospital with an illness or ailment – a real one. No more make-believe, no more M&Ms. It was serious business.

“I would get somebody in, do their blood test and call one of the doctors and tell them they have appendicitis,” Eller said. “The doctors would tell me to call an anesthetist and let them know when we were going to do the surgery.”

Back then, in the old days, a hearse was used as an ambulance. It could be a bumpy ride.

“When we put you in that old hearse and we run like the devil with you, we didn’t stop to start IVs,” Eller said. “I had bruises and bumps all over me. Now, the paramedics have all the emergency stuff there and they can take care of you.

“Back then, we didn’t have all of that stuff. I would start the IV going down Highway 70 at 100 miles per hour and get thrown all over the ambulance.”

Back in the old days, before she came to MCGH, the night shift usually included re-sharpening needles and re-powdering gloves.

The needles were stainless steel. Eller and other staff had a grindstone and a cotton ball. They’d check to see if there were any burrs on the needles. Sometimes, needles were whittled down to an eighth of inch long before being discarded.

“There’s no way, I know, that that was getting in the muscles,” Eller recalled.

Moving forward a bit, after leaving MCGH for a short time in the early 1990s, Eller said she “was homesick the whole time I was gone.”

She said she tells all aspiring nurses that if they want to be nurses they should “work in Lafayette for two years and you can get a job anywhere.”

During her time as a nurse, Eller said she’s had every part of a person’s body in her hands, from head to toe. That list includes the heart of a 6-year-old boy, back in the early 1970s.

The boy, according to Eller, had been injured on a school playground in Clay County. He’d fallen off the monkey bars and crushed his trachea.

The boy was placed in the nursing office at the school, Eller recalled. His trachea became swollen. Eller said a ballpoint pen could have saved the boy’s life, but nobody at the school knew that at the time.

The boy, by the time he arrived at the hospital, had been in full arrest for several minutes.

“We never could start him back,” Eller recalled. “We opened his chest and massaged his heart.”

Eller said there are no words to describe the feeling of saving a life. On the flip side, words can’t describe a loss, either.

“Your heart is in your throat. Everything is going over in your mind about what you could have done different, or if you’d done this or that,” Eller said. “There’s no way to describe it. You’re just pretty much numb.

“When you’re actually doing it, your mind is on what you’re doing. It’s after it’s over that you are so tense and so drained. It takes you a while. I’ve been in situations where I’ve actually had to go lay down because I couldn’t sit up.”

One time, Eller was asked if she’d ever received any awards throughout her nursing career.

“No,” Eller recalled responding. “I haven’t, and I don’t want one. But I have gotten thousands of rewards that are much greater than that.”

It was a reference to the thousands of lives she has impacted in her nursing career.

Eller said that’s the main reason she agreed to an interview, to have a story written about her nursing career in the local paper. She said it was let those thousands of folks know that she’s been blessed by each and every person she comes into contact with.

“They’re the ones that give me a reason to go on and to be able to do what I do,” said Eller, who had no children and has never been married. “There’s no way to explain that feeling when people come to you and say ‘I have my child because of you.’”

Eller’s care has extended for three – and in at least one case four – generations of one family.

Eller recalled an incident that occurred during her last stint in Hartsville.

Back then, Macon County High School’s current girls’ basketball coach, Jeff Beam, worked as lab tech there. One day, as recalled by Eller, Beam walked out of the hospital room of a 93-year-old woman.

“Is that woman OK?” Eller recalled Beam asking.

“She’s one of the smartest people in the world,” Eller responded. “She’s an old school teacher. What do you mean?”

Eller said Beam said the old lady “wasn’t thinking right.”

“What are you talking about?” Eller asked.

“That old woman,” Beam said, “just told me that you took care of her mother and daddy.”

“I did,” Eller said.

These days, in addition to nursing, Eller, along with one of her sisters, Jean Gibbs, helps keep the family farm – about 200 acres in the Russell Hill community. They’ve got 70-something cows and calves, a couple horses and border collie dogs, among others things.

Hauling hay on the farm last summer, the sister turned to Eller and asked a question.

“Didn’t we have an awful life?” Eller said her sister asked.

“How can you say that?” Eller responded. “I wouldn’t trade my life for nobody’s.”

Months later, in recalling the conversation, Eller Sircy added:

“We had very simple rules and didn’t have to worry about it. Treat everybody like you want to be treated, don’t take nothing that don’t belong to you and there’s nobody no worse or no better. That was very easy to live by – that’s what my daddy taught us.

“There are no little people, there are no big people. One job is just as important as another. If you’re a ditch-digger, you do it well. It takes everybody to make the world go.”