Sacus Retires with 35 Years of Service
WEST POINT, Miss.—Elisha Sacus, registered nurse and house supervisor at North Mississippi Medical Center-West Point, has retired with more than 35 years of service.
Born in Aberdeen, Sacus moved with her family to Chicago at age 5. She graduated from Simeon Vocational High School in Chicago in 1974 and worked a few odd jobs before completing licensed practical nurse training at William L. Dawson Skills Center there in 1980. “I wanted to join the military and work with computers, but my Mom talked me out of it,” she said. “It took me a few years to find my calling.”
Sacus worked as an LPN for the University of Chicago Medical Center before moving back to Aberdeen in 1982. She worked for a local nursing home and the former Monroe County Hospital before joining the NMMC-West Point (which was then Clay County Medical Center) on Oct. 28, 1985. “When I walked into the hospital’s atrium for the first time, I thought ‘this is a beautiful hospital,’” she said. “I was eating in the cafeteria one day and someone pointed out the hospital administrator, Mr. Mike Reid. I came from a big hospital in Chicago and all we knew was that we had an administrator. And there Mr. Reid was, sitting in the cafeteria with the rest of us. When I saw that you could actually talk to the administrator, that was just amazing to me.” She started working nights on the medical-surgical unit and in the nursery, and then transitioned to day shift in the nursery.
“After having children, I wanted to go to nursing school so that I could be there to help women in labor,” Sacus said. On a hospital scholarship, she earned her associate degree in nursing from Mississippi University for Women in 1993 and became a registered nurse in Labor and Delivery. With tuition reimbursement from the hospital, she earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2013. She also became house nursing supervisor that year.
Sacus retired Dec. 11 and is most appreciative of her time at NMMC-West Point. “I got a chance to do what I really wanted to do, which was work in Labor and Delivery,” she said. “The hospital staff was like a family. I love the people there and we care about one another. The Lord just blessed my career there.”
Her husband, Eugene, passed away Feb. 16, just two months shy of their 30th anniversary. He served as bishop of Holy Temple Apostolic Faith Church in Aberdeen. Now that she is retired, she plans to “step up and help” to continue his work with their church and ministry. She wants to spend more time with her children and grandchildren—Javan and Jessica Walker live in Batesville and have three children, Dominik, Kayla and Anne Marie; Titus and Vandetta Walker live in Tupelo and have two children, Tobia and Amare.
She also hopes to bake more Elisha’s Cream Cakes, a project she started years ago to sell her homemade “grandma’s old-fashioned cakes” in various flavors.
