Nance Elbrader cared for wounded soldiers in field hospitals in France and Belgium during World War II. She took temperatures, checked for pulses and dispensed morphine as the war went on around her.

“You just carried on like nothing was happening,” she said. “There wasn’t anything else you could do.”

May 6-12 is Nurses Week, a time to celebrate nurses like Elbrader, Keith Alberding, a minister-turned-nurse at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, and Sue Iverson, a first-year nurse who works the night shift at Topeka’s Stormont-Vail HealthCare.

They view their jobs as a type of ministry, a way to reach out to others in their most trying times, a chance to save a life or simply bring comfort.

“You don’t just look,” Elbrader said. “You see. You don’t just hear. You listen. I had become so aware of doing that when we were in Europe during the war. … That was the only way you could know if your patients were going bad on you.”

Elbrader, now 87, retired in 1984. But the memory of the field hospitals, where soldiers too battered to travel farther were taken, is fresh.

She worked in a surgery center. It was a time for lifesaving.

Keith Alberding, a registered nurse with the Outpatient Services and gastrointestinal lab at Lawrence Memorial Hospital South, tends to a patient. May 6-12 is Nurses Week.

“It was a terrible time,” she said. “But at the time, it was what we were doing. We were in a war.”

Elbrader said no one ever died on her watch.

Keith Alberding has been a registered nurse at LMH for nearly two decades. Before that he was a Methodist minister. He’s also a musician.

Alberding, who works in LMH’s gastrointestinal lab, enjoys the interaction with people while on the job.

“A nurse is a lot of times the person who touches the patient the most,” he said. “We’re the ones who make the difference between a good experience and a bad experience.”

Alberding said good nurses listen and aren’t quick to judge.

They may not always give good news, he said, but they must show patients a willingness to listen.

For Sue Iverson, nursing is about the third or fourth career stop. She’s been a teacher, a stay-at-home mother and a credit administrator in the oil industry.

But Iverson said her calling has long been nursing.

“It’s not just a job to me,” she said. “It’s very much a ministry.”

Iverson, who copes with the bleeding disorder Von Willebrand disease, knows what it’s like to be a patient for extended periods of time.

She knows how chronic illness disrupts lifestyles and affects entire families.

Iverson works the night shift at Stormont-Vail, caring for patients in a step-down unit from the intensive care unit. She sees patients with cancer, diabetes, renal failure, heart failure and emphysema.

She sees her role as helping patients get better, but also giving them a sense of hope and a bit of comfort.

“I like to make people comfortable,” she said. “I like to make people feel welcome and feel good about themselves, and you can do all of that by being a nurse.”