Cindy Kingswood: Taking care of others still in her future

An hours-old baby girl was found, placed in a cardboard box, and propped against the Estes Park post office door. Her mother watched from a parked car, waiting for someone to rescue the infant. It was Christmas Eve, 1982, and the rescuer, a postal worker, arrived at 5:45 a.m.

Cindy Kingswood was the registered nurse on duty when the baby was delivered to the hospital. The baby was healthy and warm despite outside temperatures in the 20s. Kingswood and the other nurses named her Holly Doe and bought her first Christmas gifts: clothes and stuffed animals. Kingswood took care of Holly for several days until Social Services stepped in.

Twenty-one years later, the former Holly Doe placed a notice in the Trail-Gazette, asking if anyone had information about the post office foundling. She knew nothing about her past.

“That was cool to have something to tell her. If I hadn’t stuck here all those years, nobody would have remembered,” Kingswood said.

Kingswood recently retired from a 43-year career at the then-Elizabeth Knutsen Memorial Hospital, now known as Estes Park Health. She never anticipated becoming a nurse. When her mother, Clella Johnson Essex, was the nurse at Covenant Heights church camp near Allenspark, Kingswood had watched her handle some gnarly injuries, and she wasn’t keen to follow suit.

But she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do after graduating from Estes Park High School.

“I was a little wild,” she said. She ran with a crowd that frequented the Rock Inn when it had less refinement, motorcycle aficionados, and 3.2 beer, Colorado’s favored and legal spirit for those under 21 at the time. Her parents thought there were better pursuits.

“I wanted to travel. I wanted to go somewhere.”

In high school, she studied Spanish with LeeAnn Wehr. As a result, Kingswood left high school able to get her point across in Spanish, so she was equipped for international work, and Colombia, South America, beckoned. She found an opportunity to do missionary work in an orphanage, which would help launch a career in social work.

The orphanage work didn’t pan out. In 1979, it was too dangerous for a young, blond American to commute by herself.

“There was a guy with a machine gun that walked up and down the street. I couldn’t wear earrings or any jewelry. You couldn’t look like you had anything,” she recalled.

While in Colombia, she had the sudden realization that she was going to be a nurse.  She asked her mother to find a nursing school. The search was a challenge, as most schools had passed their admissions dates.

“She found a little school in Kansas that was still accepting students, and that’s where I went.”

After graduation from Heston College, a Mennonite school, Kingswood and a friend planned to work in Hawaii. Kingswood agreed to make a stopover in Estes Park and work for three months in the hospital. She extended her stay, reasoning that a full year of experience would look better on a resume.

She was taking care of a patient when a visitor walked into the room. Instead of a trip across the Pacific, she married that visitor, Mike Kingswood, who wanted to build a construction business and spend a lifetime in Estes Park.

At the time, the hospital had 16 beds and three doctors.

“We did everything,” Kingswood remembered. “If somebody came in and needed their dressing changed, we did dressing changes. If they needed a blood transfusion, you did transfusions. The stuff we did in our ER was amazing,” she said, remembering even a gunshot wound from a hunting accident that she treated.

Kingswood’s first Mother’s Day on the job involved a baby, delivered at about 22 weeks, who wasn’t expected to live. The little one didn’t give up. The nurses and other medical staff fashioned a homemade incubator, using tin foil and a lamp. The invention kept the baby warm on the way to the valley, to a bigger hospital. In the end, the baby survived.

After many years as a generalist, Kingswood was ready for a career shift. She became the home health and hospice nurse.

This work fostered more stories and some deep connections.

She remembers a stressful and hard death:

“This guy’s dying, and his daughter came to me, and she says, ‘I’m so concerned because my dad has no faith, and he keeps saying he smells burning.”

“It was really bothering her, you know, like he wasn’t seeing the great white light.”

“He was past the point of having conversations. And it was hard to think that he was going to leave his daughter in distress about where he was going after he died. I’ve never forgotten that conversation. It would break my heart if my mom went through that.”

Kingswood fondly remembers other deaths.

“I remember another death with this lady. I loved her, and her family was great. I went there at night when the mortuary had to come up from the valley. But as they took her body out, we all went outside and we sang, ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ It was one o’clock in the morning. This was a good thing. It wasn’t so sad.”

Kingswood shifted to a new role. She became a clinic nurse about seven years ago. The hours were better and she was able to spend all holidays and weekends with her family for the first time in her 43-year career.

When Estes Park Health suspended home healthcare and hospice services at the end of 2023, Kingswood said the loss had a personal impact on her as her mother is a home-bound patient whose physical limitations make it extremely difficult to have in-office visits, Kingswood said.

In caring for her mother, she recalled a situation earlier in her career when she and her colleagues became caretakers for a coworker who was being cared for at her home as she was dying from a terminal illness. The team of colleagues and Kingswood’s tasks included gathering samples for lab work and giving intravenous medications at the coworker’s home.

Now, in a somewhat similar situation, when her mother needed labs, Kingswood put on her old home health hat and drew her mother’s blood. “I mentioned it to somebody, and they reported me. I didn’t know I’d done anything wrong.”

Administrators weren’t sure whether Kingswood violated an existing hospital policy and put her on administrative leave so they could interrogate and investigate.

“I was told I couldn’t talk to anybody. How long did that last? Well, not long, because I turned in my resignation.”

She retired about six months earlier than planned.

Her retirement party was bittersweet. Long-time friends, former patients, and her doctor colleagues came. Hospital administrators and many of her peers were not there, she said.

“It was maybe good timing,” she said. She enjoyed an extended holiday with all her children, who came home to celebrate.

Her path ahead is not yet mapped. Others in her circle are experiencing hard health challenges. She looks forward to helping them, as well as her mother. She will prioritize time with friends.

“That would give me purpose,” she said. “I don’t think I’m done taking care of people.”