Interview by Gainesville High School intern and Abernathy Cochran intern John Jessup
Meet Speaker Angie Caton! Angie has been a nurse at Northeast Georgia Medical Center for the last 20 years and she is a mother of two.
We want to thank Angie for speaking with us recently and telling us more about her life and love of Hall County.
Please tell us a little bit about your family.
A: “I am a single mother of two adult children, I have a 34-year old and a 32-year old. My son lives in Norcross and my daughter, she’s married and lives in Charlotte. I don’t have any other immediate family in the state of Georgia, I’m originally from Louisiana, where all my extended family is from, I have a very large family from there. I have two cats, too.”
Q: What do you love most about what you do?
A: “I’ve been a nurse for 39 years. I love talking and helping people. You would call it maybe like a nurse-teacher kind of person, an educator of nurses and of patients. I do community education and outreach.”
Q: What are a couple of your favorite restaurants in our community?
A: “I love Scott’s, Luna’s, Mellow Mushroom, Cook-Out, Southern Bake Pie, and Atlanta Highway Seafood Market – their shrimp po boy. I love food. You can’t go wrong with any of those.”
Q: How long have you lived or worked in our community?
A: “I live in Forsyth County, but I’ve worked in Hall County for 20 years at the hospital.”
Q: If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would it be and why?
A: “Last year, I would’ve said Mount Rushmore, but I went last year so I think I’m wanting to go to Niagara Falls.”
Q: What is one of your favorite movies or TV shows?
A: I love any kind of crime TV show like ‘Forensic Files’ or any kind of ‘Law & Order.’ My favorite movie is anything in the Batman series, I like action movies, I’m not probably like your typical middle aged woman. I don’t like sappy love stories particularly, I’d rather action movies and Sci-fi.”
Q: Do you have any advice that you would want to give or leave with anyone?
A: “What I’d like to say to people thinking about a healthcare career, that it’s not all about being a nurse in a hospital. Healthcare needs lots of different types of people to work to keep it running, there’s so many different jobs and roles in a hospital from finance to kitchen. And it’s not just about just nurses and doctors that do things that make the world go round, it’s the whole team of people in a hospital, and hospitals are like a village.”
Q: What current or former or local business makes you the most nostalgic about our community?
A: “The building where Mellow Mushroom is, it used to be Rudolph’s. I think that’s probably the most nostalgic since I’ve been working here for 20 years. It was a restaurant and then converted to Mellow Mushroom and I guess people knew it from different things before that, too. When you pass by, you think of all the different things that buildings have been, especially on Green Street.”
Q: If you could choose anyone that is alive today and not a relative with whom you would love to have lunch?
A: “Richard Nixon, I’ve always had a fondness for him for some odd reason. I would love to learn more about him as a person and some of his political decisions. I think I would take him somewhere more private like in Sweet Magnolia’s. It has a nice, light menu. To have some Southern kind of food, he’s more North Pennsylvania and California kind of person.”
Q: What’s your favorite thing or something unique about our community?
A: “I love all the festivals and the activities on the square. The Christmas activities with the lighting of the chicken. At the hospital, we can hear concerts outdoors, we can hear music playing. I think college life is very unique here too. I was watching the young people coming out of classes or buildings and walking down the street, you just forget it’s a real college town, too.”
Q: What is something you hope our community has or does in the future?
A: “I think it would be nice if it continues to grow and in the ways that it has. It’s kind of like some purposeful growth, it’s like the new businesses and the way that the community embraces these older buildings instead of mowing them down and making a high rise. People are in these older buildings and taking care of them and preserving history. I think that’s important a lot of times because we like everything shiny and new, but sometimes it’s just really nice to pass down the street here especially at Christmas time. “
Q: Where do you see yourself in five to 10 years?
A: “I hope in five years I will still be working and in 10 years hopefully happily retired. I hope that after I retire, I continue to volunteer in our community with different organizations that have meant a lot to me like Good News Clinic and other health related organizations, even at the hospital maybe.”
Q: What is something on your bucket list?
A: “Last year was to see Mount Rushmore and to go out to the Dakotas. I think my next bucket list would be to go up to the Northeast and like Maine, upper New York to seek connection, Niagara Falls, that kind of thing. A dream of mine is after I retire to just kind of like to travel around a little bit in a camper…I have a sailboat, but I haven’t really used it that much since the pandemic because I haven’t been able to get out and do just different priorities. I’d like to have more free time, like more leisure time.”
Q: What is your go-to band when you can’t decide what to listen to? Or any musical artists?
A: “I love anything seventies. So my favorite artist who recently passed away was Meatloaf. I also like the current music from Harry Styles.”
Q: In hard times we can sometimes see and recognize greatness in those around us. Hardworking, positive attitudes, helping on the front lines, who is one of our local shining lights today that exhibits those traits?
A: “We’ve heard a lot in the news and stuff about nurses but really the nurses that are taking care of people, and I say nurses in general but the nurses that take care of people in the hospital at the bedside; they’ve had it pretty rough. I work mostly in the outpatient area now where patients come in and out. You come get a medicine, then you go home. But the people that are caring for people day in and day out, those are kind of hard jobs to do these days with all the isolation and masks and all that.”
Q: What is the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?
A: “Alaska. We were on the Alaskan Railroad and it was a beautiful day like today and you could see Mt. McKinley like you could almost touch it. It was just crystal clear, gorgeous and things that you just never dreamed you’d see in your lifetime. Beautiful mountain ranges, all the snow, the wild animals, it just was beautiful it makes you tear up. Think about how beautiful the world is. Last year, we took a week off, went with a couple friends and we flew into Colorado and we just drove around. I just want my eyes to be filled with beautiful memories, it’s not necessarily about exactly going somewhere exactly but I like to look at real pretty things.”
Q: Do you have a favorite month or holiday?
A: “My favorite holiday is Christmas. December, it can be my favorite month, sometimes it can be happy and can be sad too because it’s my birthday and I’m not happy when I get older, and happy because it’s my daughter’s birthday.”
Q: Is there anything in life that you would rate a 10 out of 10?
A: “Beautiful days like today, when the air is crisp and the sun is shining and the sky is blue. And we need rain too, you can’t just have all beautiful sunny days so after it rains it smells so fresh and clean like everything’s been washed and I like the smell of the rain.”
Q: Who would you want to play you in a movie about your life?
A: “Jody Foster. When I was younger, I was told that I look like her, but now that I’m not as thin as her, I don’t necessarily look as much like her.”
Q: What is one or two of your favorite smells?
A: “Cinnamon and lavender. Cinnamon makes me happy, lavender makes me calm. I love cinnamon, one of my favorite scents is lavender. I spray lavender everywhere, lavender spray fruit pillows and I just think lavender just makes you kind of center and makes me calm anyway.”
Q: Who inspires you to be better?
A: “My patients. The people I care for every day because they come up with different needs like today someone might need something and then tomorrow they might need something new and I have to learn something new to take care of them or I have to read about something new to be able to educate them and I think that the people that you meet help keep you on your game. Everybody’s so different and there’s different things every single day, that’s one thing about being a nurse, you always learn.”
