Nurse recalled as 'glue' of program

Slightly more than 15 years ago, flight nurse Kathy Batterman gave the eulogy for her colleague and best friend Jessica Hilt after three Flight for Life crew members were killed in the Valley Hospital program's only other fatal accident in its history.

Today, Batterman's friends are grieving her death and remembering a nurse who, according to her husband, Kurt, "lived and breathed Flight for Life."

"She was the glue that held Flight for Life together," said Lori Yardley, a longtime colleague of Batterman's as a former head nurse at Valley until 1996. Yardley is now a nurse at University Medical Center.

"Kathy was one of the most special people," Judith Hendricks, administrative supervisor at Valley, said.

Batterman, who started with Flight for Life in its second year, was one of three crew members who died when their helicopter went down Saturday just before midnight near Indian Springs en route to Pahrump. Flight nurse Leroy Shelton and pilot James Bond Jr. also died in the crash.

A federally certified flight nurse named a runner-up in 1997 as Las Vegas Nurse of the Year by the March of Dimes, Batterman also was featured in a 1992 episode of American Detective titled "Shields of Honor."

The mother of two spoke bluntly of the dangers of her job in the episode.

"I don't think there are that many people in the world who love their jobs to the point that they would be willing to give their life for it," she said. "And I am."

But she made it clear it wasn't just the job. It was saving lives that was important.

"Every time I come back from a flight, I know I'm going out again. It's the chance to save another life," she said. "God watches over the helicopter as it goes in the sky."

While showing the television crew a plaque dedicating the hospital's rooftop flight pad to the crew members killed in 1983 outside Henderson, she remembered Hilt's death as "probably one of the worst things to happen to me."

"I had never had a best friend die, and certainly not in this kind of work."

But Yardley remembers Batterman as the person in the aftermath of that 1983 crash -- in which Hilt, pilot Paul Kinsey and paramedic Chris Hasselfeld died -- who was "really instrumental in walking through that with us."

"When many of us wanted to sit down and cry and were feeling paralyzed, she encouraged us to go to Jessica's house and Chris's house.

"That was the spirit of the flight program."

Batterman also was determined to keep the Flight for Life helicopters in the air during an economic crisis that almost killed the program earlier in 1983, and she was one of the nurses who kept flying after the 1983 crash. "Many didn't," Yardley said.

"She said, 'We're going to hold it together. I'm going back,' " Yardley recalled. "She believed in the program and the communities it served."

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