09/11/2026
🪙 September Challenge Coin Recognition
Our September Challenge Coin recipient is someone whose nursing journey has come full circle in a beautiful way.
She was born and raised right here in Benton, Arkansas, and as a young woman wasn’t completely certain nursing would be her path. She originally considered teaching, but with an aunt who was an LPTN and a sister who became a nurse, the profession was never very far away.
In 1975, just months after graduating from high school, she moved into the nursing dorm at the old Baptist Hospital in Little Rock and began practical nursing school.
She graduated as an LPN in 1976, beginning a career that would ultimately span bedside nursing, pediatrics, clinic nursing, telephone triage, nursing education, and much more.
She later returned to school and earned her RN in 1993, her BSN in 2010, and her MSN in 2013.
Much of her clinical career centered around children. She worked in pediatrics at Baptist, spent years working alongside a pediatrician, and later returned to Saline Memorial Hospital, where she worked in pediatrics and the nursery. While there, she also helped develop Saline Sitters, teaching young babysitters first aid, CPR, child safety, and proper childcare.
But there was another calling waiting for her.
Teaching.
She had always been the nurse who taught others, prepared in-services, and made sure those around her understood not only what to do, but why they were doing it.
After being passed over several times for an educator position, she happened to see an advertisement for a faculty position at Baptist Health School of Nursing.
She believes to this day that what happened next was a God thing.
She applied—and three days after her interview, Baptist called and offered her the position.
The nurse who once considered becoming a teacher had found a way to become both a nurse and a teacher.
She spent many years educating future nurses, first in the LPN program and later in RN and LPN-to-RN programs, with pediatrics remaining her specialty.
Her journey was not without hardship. While completing her MSN, she cared for both of her aging parents and lost them within months of one another. Still, knowing how proud they were of her education, she remained determined to finish what she had started.
Then in 2022, a sudden illness left her permanently deaf in her left ear and with significant balance difficulties. The experience ultimately brought her nursing education career to an earlier retirement than she had planned.
But retirement does not erase a nurse’s influence.
Her legacy continues in every patient she cared for, every parent she reassured, and especially in the generations of nurses who once sat in her classroom and carried what she taught them into their own patient rooms.
Sometimes nursing legacy is measured by the patients we personally touch.
And sometimes it multiplies through the nurses we help prepare to care for thousands more.
💙🪙💛
Please join me in congratulating
Carolyn Middlebrooks Wright , LPN, RN, BSN, MSN, our September Challenge Coin recipient!
Carolyn, thank you for a lifetime of caring, teaching, persevering, and helping prepare the nurses who followed behind you. Your legacy continues through them
