ARVADA - Barb Wertz was blessed with brains, which helped her to make life better for others.

But for the first time in her life, she is wondering what she's going to do with the rest of her life.

"With my family, it was never if you were going to college - it was when you go to college," she said Tuesday. "They were always very big on goals."

Now, she doesn't have a clue.

"I didn't think about what I was going to do when I retired, just because I was having a good time doing what I was doing," she said.

Wertz, 67, has finished a 50-year nursing career, including school. In her latest role, she was in charge of all of the nurses at Exempla St. Joseph Hospital the past five years.

She said she's going to take some time to contemplate her future.

Maybe she'll do volunteer work at a hospice. Maybe something else will come to her. Whatever it is, she'll go at it full blast, if she's true to her track record.

She grew up in Trinidad. Her dad, Joe Ferendelli, worked as a miner and then as a small-business man - grocery store and dry cleaner.

Her mom, Mary Cappellucci Ferendelli, was a teacher.

"Nursing has always been my passion," Wertz said. "When I was growing up, women didn't have as many choices what they wanted to do - get married, become a secretary, teacher or nurse. Nursing appealed to me from the very beginning."

Her family encouraged her. Her brother, Ron Ferendelli, was a dentist in Arvada and is now retired. He and some of her high school girlfriends persuaded her to enroll in the three-year nursing course at St. Joe's. So she did, finishing in 1960.

Along the way, she married her grade school sweetheart, Paul Wertz. They have been married 46 years.

"I never do anything short-term," she said.

She took time off from nursing to raise her three children. She also was a nurse in California and Kansas. But she was always lured back to the Denver area.

She helped open the first ICU at St. Joe's. She worked in psychiatric nursing and with cancer patients. She became a manager.

But her first love was the oncology unit.

"That is the most complete type of nursing ever," she said. "You use every skill that you have. It's high-tech. It's high-touch. It's high-teach, and very high-involvement. And it's high-team."

Whatever she decides on from now on, she'll still call on the words of her first mentor in the business, the late Sister Mary Jerome, who told her back in nursing school: "Never back away from a challenge. Always be the very best you can be."

She tried to do that every day on the job, no matter what kind of nursing she was involved in.

And she left with a lot of pride about what she had done.

"The job was a 12- to 14-hour a day job. I absolutely loved every minute of it. I just did the job," she said. "Nursing was a career. It was a calling. It was a blessing."

massarog@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5271