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Corinne Dunn Chabot graduated from the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing at the Frontier Nursing Service in 1976. For the next 40 years, she worked as a nurse practitioner (NP), retiring in 2016. Recently, she graciously took the time to share her stories from four decades of nursing.

“I arrived in Hyden, Kentucky, about a month after graduating from a four-year college program as a boarded Registered Nurse with zero experience in real life. My friend and I had planned to spend one adventurous year in Kentucky and then return home to Minnesota to real careers,” Chabot said “I was assigned to work in the clinic, otherwise known as the emergency room, with the supervision of other NPs.”

After nearly a year of working in the clinic, upon the urging of friends, Chabot enrolled in the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) program. After graduating from Frontier, Chabot took a job with the National Health Service Corps in a rural hospital in the logging community of Forks, Washington. “There was a great deal of discussion and disagreement about what people in this new role should even be called. The term ‘nurse practitioner’ came about as a way to define us as different from ‘ordinary nurses’ because of the skills we developed and the tasks we did,” Chabot said. “We examined patients and then made decisions about treatment plans. We chose medications and wrote prescriptions. This was almost treason in the vision of physicians and hospital nurses. There was a great deal of pushback in some areas until there were enough of us working in the field to show our fellow professionals what we could do and how we could help both them and the patients.”

Dedicated to bringing healthcare to rural and underserved areas, the National Health Service Corps proved to be a perfect fit for nurse practitioners.

“I was given extra coaching and observation and was put in the rotation of managing normal deliveries in the hospital, with a doctor always on-site,” Chabot said. “We all did well and had no obstetrical disasters on my watch. I also learned how to sew up chainsaw cuts very neatly.”

Chabot moved to Reedsport, Oregon, two years later to work at a brand new Robert Woods Johnson rural practice project clinic. Working alongside a physician there, she provided family care, prenatal and postpartum visits, and occasionally delivered babies.

“This was a small town, and word spread there was a woman at the clinic who could do your pap smear and as well as talk about depression. I was busy,” Chabot said.

Not only did she have a full plate at the clinic, but Chabot also became a leader and advocate for nurse practitioners. Working with state nursing and medical groups, she helped define state laws for rural clinics like the Robert Woods Johnson clinic. She was also a key advocate for obtaining independent prescriptive privileges for the state’s nurse practitioners.

“Prescriptive privileges were a critical need for NPs working very distantly from their legally required preceptors,” Chabot said. “One of my patients was the wife of the state senate president, and she told me she was going to lots of parties and telling people about the role of nurse practitioners and the need for legal support. The law passed in 1979 as one of the first in the country.”

Corinne with her husband, Dan.While living in Reedsport, Chabot married and became pregnant with her first child. She anxiously awaited the birth, but concerns grew as her due date came and went.

“When my labor finally started, it was four weeks past my due date,” Chabot said. “My perfect daughter could not survive beyond early labor. After there was no heartbeat, I was transferred to the next largest hospital for an eventual C-section.”

Chabot insists on sharing this tragic experience because of the important lessons that came with it. With family on the other side of the country, she and her husband found a family in their community.

“The La Leche League ladies brought us suppers for a month. I never carried my groceries to my car or pumped my gas. We were given space or comfort as needed. My patients, any and all, gave back what I had given, and I was humbled,” she said. “The experience of losing an infant also taught me about grief, grieving, healing, and living. The greatest gift my daughter gave me was the gift of empathy. I really know what grief pain is. That gift served me throughout the rest of my long career in primary care, pediatric psyche care, and in cancer care. That was my daughter’s gift to all my patients. I understood pain.”

Chabot shared her story as an essay on motherhood with loss for the National Public Radio show “Listen to Your Mother.” She and her husband later had two healthy sons and eventually moved to Maine, where her husband had grown up. They also spent time living in Minnesota, and Chabot earned a Master of Science degree as an FNP from the University of Minnesota in 2000.

“I was returning to an educational process 27 years into my career as a ground floor nurse practitioner after introducing the role in several states,” she said. “I always felt I had learned the absolute bedrock of independent nursing practice and honest family-focused care at Frontier Nursing Service. What saved me from making many critical errors was that I learned from the best, most basic, independent, strong role models in the profession while they were forging a pathway to define what this new role would become. The Family Nurses and Midwives at the Frontier Nursing Service were unequaled both as caregivers and as teachers. I have always been proud to claim that certificate from the Frontier Nursing Service as the strongest building block of my resume. It was recognized as such.”

In the latter part of her career, Chabot took on the challenge of learning something new and began working in oncology care and worked in the radiation department, helping patients cope with the side effects of treatment.

“The Frontier Nursing Service has really defined the trajectory of my whole life,” Chabot said. “I am always a nurse practitioner and will be a decision-maker until I die. My son, who is now a physician, told me once, ‘Mom, I want to be the one who knows what to do. Like you.’”

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