Kristen Compton

NEW ULM – Oak Hills RNA Kristen Compton has been helping patients rehab their way back to health for over six years.

Working the late shift at the care center five nights a week and every other weekend, Compton has seen her share of medical conditions.

“I work with residents and people who come in after having surgeries or falls or accidents or anything like that, where they need to have in-house rehab,” she said. “They can’t be on their own at home while they’re rehabbing.”

Compton said the night shift runs from 10:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m., and that her unit has a nurse, a TMA (trained medication aide), and three aides.

“We have 22 rooms that we take care of,” she said. “We have some younger patients around my age that have come in for rehab all the way up to, like, we have a resident that’s like 105.”

While Compton is younger than most of her patients, when it comes to her colleagues, they have adopted an endearing nickname for her.

“The girls at work call me mom because I always bring them food, at least two, three times a week,” she said. “Last night I brought a big container. I had made cabbage roll stew from scratch. So they got that last night. Or earlier this week I had made homemade pizzas where I made the crust by hand and everything. So they got that.”

Compton said her family enjoys gardening in their free time, and freezing and canning fruits and vegetables.

“We are just one of those families, we try and do everything natural and homemade,” she said.

“We wanted to cut out a lot of the processed foods,” she said. “Our oldest is autistic. He has a lot of food sensitivity so I started making all of our pastas homemade, our breads homemade. I make everything from scratch.”

If they have lasagna, it’s scratch made. Noodles with homemade sauce and the meat is always from the local butchers.

“Everybody seems to be feeling a lot healthier, with a lot less issues. And then our youngest is actually so used to it he’ll go to the grocery store with me and be like: ‘That’s not bread, mom, that’s not what your bread looks like.'”

Which is all to say that family comes first in Compton’s life.

“I work nights so that I can be home with my kids during the day,” she said. “So that we don’t have to put the youngest in daycare. I can go to all the school meetings. I can go to all the doctor’s appointments without having to take off work.”

And sleep is a rare commodity in her life.

“We have a standing thing that we always have family dinner when their dad gets home,” she said. “I have dinner on the table by 6 and then I’m usually in bed by about 7, 7:30 and I’m up by 9:30. I sleep about two and a half hours.”

Compton said the ideal family vacation would be to pack up the kids and their two dogs and hit the road.

“We want to take the kids to the Omaha Zoo,” she said. “My grandmother always talked about it before she passed and she told me we have to take the kids. We thought it would be fun to take them and find a cabin, you know, within an hour driving distance, stay in the cabin on a lake or something, and take one day to go down to the zoo.”

Compton grew up mostly in New Ulm, though she did spend some time in Germany where her dad was stationed when she was very young. She enjoyed choir all the way through her school days, especially the choir trips and concerts with Mr. Maki.

After traveling around the country for two years, where she got to all the states except Alaska and Hawaii, Compton returned to New Ulm and got certified for her work at Oak Hills.

Compton is happy with her crew on the night shift, working with eight others on three units.

“Night shift is different,” she said. “Nobody is really different. Even the nurses, they’re just one of us. They call themselves one of the girls. We’re all in it together. We’re all answering the calls and doing everything the same.”