"I graduated as a nurse at 70"

After losing her husband to Parkinson’s disease and beating cancer, Neysa King was ready for a new challenge. She went back to university to study nursing, and now she’s bringing a lifetime of wisdom to the patients in her care.

- WORDS by SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

Neysa King has a spring in her step as she walks the hospital corridor. Noiselessly, she crosses the threshold to Intensive Care where she checks on one of her charges. A gentle hand on the shoulder. Neysa has a gift for this work. It’s hard to believe that, after a career in business, she only found her way back to her first love - nursing - two years ago. She was 70 when she graduated from university and put on her navy nursing scrubs for the first time in almost 40 years.

“It’s bloody hard work,” she admits. “It’s exhausting, but I love it because it’s meaningful, and it’s purposeful and there is always so much to learn.”

Neysa’s first round of nursing was in her 20s. “I did hospital-based training and then I went overseas, as young people do,” she tells The Weekly. “I went to America and ended up getting married and divorced.”

Back in Australia 14 years later, she segued from nursing into the pharmaceutical industry, and from there into the business world.

In the meantime, Neysa had met and married her second husband, Tony King, a handsome paramedic and pharmaceutical salesman. They had a son, Anthony, and lived not far from the sea on the NSW Central Coast, and Neysa’s work took her around the world.

Then Tony was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. “He worked for the first couple of years,” Neysa explains, “but his cognitive decline was quite rapid. Then it was a real juggling of the balls for a while. I was the sole income earner, and I was trying to get my son through school and also ensure that Tony had a good quality of life. It took a toll.”

Six months before he died, Tony transferred into residential care just across the road from the family home. By then, Anthony had moved away to university, and Neysa was working flexibly, so she visited often.