Florentia Riebel Death, Obituary – We would like to offer our sincerest sympathies to you and your family on the passing of Sister Florentia Riebel, who was 106 years old when she died away. We were totally oblivious to the fact that she had passed away until long later. Many people came to refer to her as “Sister Flo” over the course of her more than seventy years of service as a ministry at St. Mary’s. She devoted the most of her professional life to serving in that role throughout her career. She was an Adorer of the Blood of Christ, and she devoted her entire 88 years of life to praising the merits of the Blood of Christ and bringing glory to it.
She graduated with a nursing degree from the St. Mary Hospital School of Nursing in 1941, and she was given a position as a supervisor on the medical and surgical floor precisely one week after getting her certificate. She accepted the position. After that, she began working as a nurse at the Artesia Municipal Hospital in New Mexico, where she remained for the next two years of her professional life in the role of nursing unit supervisor. During that time period, she was in charge of all of the nursing units that could be found within the hospital itself.
Sister Flo boarded a train destined for Pennsylvania immediately following the conclusion of her shift at St. Mary’s Hospital. She would take part in a training program there that was designed to prepare her to assist in the care of polio sufferers. She would head back to New York after reaching her destination in Pennsylvania. At the end of the day, she arrived at the conclusion that she wanted to attend the School of Physical Therapy at the University of Chicago. After excelling in her studies at that school, she received a degree in physical therapy from that same establishment in the year 1952. She eventually made her way back to St. Mary’s, where she established the first physical therapy program in the region to assist people who had successfully recovered from polio and its aftereffects. She did this to help others who had been in a similar position as she had been before she contracted polio.