By Carlos E. Medina
When Colleen McLarnon graduated from the University of Florida College of Nursing with her Bachelor of Science in Nursing in 1983, she only planned to spend three years in the U.S. Navy. Instead, she stayed for 30.
“I joined just to see what it was like,” McLarnon said. “Next thing I knew, three decades had gone by.”
The Michigan-born nurse, who grew up in Canada and Ireland, credits her father, a World War II medic in the Canadian Army, for inspiring her call to service.
“It was the idea of being part of something bigger than yourself,” she said. “The Navy gave me that in every way.”
Early in her career, McLarnon was stationed on the remote atoll of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, a key communications and logistics base. She served as the island’s only nurse and trained as a Navy flight nurse through an Air Force program that accepted just one Navy nurse per year.
“Sometimes it was just me and a corpsman flying patients with critical illnesses or injuries to Singapore,” she said. “You had to be confident and clinically sound. There was no backup.”
McLarnon went on to serve as the sole nurse aboard an aircraft carrier with more than 5,000 personnel. There, she led medical training for the ship’s crew and supervised corpsmen who served as the backbone of shipboard care.
“When a sailor came in with appendicitis, I was the nurse in the emergency bay. I told him that the nurse in the operating room was great. When he got there, it was me in the operating room. I told him the nurse in recovery was the best. It was me in recovery,” she said, laughing. “He finally realized I was the only nurse on board.”
Her leadership grew as she advanced in rank. During the Iraq War in the early 2000s, McLarnon helped develop the Navy’s En Route Care Program, a critical care air transport course still used today to train Navy and Marine Corps medical personnel.
“It was about getting patients safely from battlefield surgical units to higher levels of care,” she said. “I’m proud that the program continues to prepare people for that mission.”
She lobbied to be sent to the field so she could assess the program in person, but her repeated requests were denied.
“I really wanted to get out there. But they said I could get all the assessment I needed where I was, so I said, ‘Aye, aye,’” she said.
Throughout her service, education and mentorship remained central to McLarnon’s work. Whether she was training young nurses or teaching corpsmen emergency procedures, she saw knowledge and preparation as key. That’s why every corpsman learned how to deliver a baby.
“One of my former corpsmen once told me he delivered his own baby in a truck because he remembered what I taught him about childbirth emergencies,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing that stays with you.”
McLarnon retired as a Navy captain in 2014, but her connection to the College of Nursing remains strong. She credits the college for setting the foundation of her lifelong dedication to service and teaching.
“The professors there pushed me to keep learning, even when I said I was done with school,” she said. “That encouragement followed me throughout my career.”
From her two years working at UF Health Shands to the flight decks of carriers and the skies above war zones, McLarnon’s career embodied the spirit of a Gator Nurse — caring for others wherever the mission leads.