It's been a wild couple of weeks for the former Audrey Bazemore, originally from Swainboro, Ga., but then again, being the wife of Aiken County's most prominent physician has kept her busy for about three generations now.

Audrey Watson shared the spotlight with her husband, Dr. W.G. "Curly" Watson, in his 100th birthday celebration, and took a few minutes to share some memories from the past 60-plus years.

"I've always wanted to be a nurse," she recalled. My cousin had been through school, in line for nursing, and she would come to see us and she'd have that nurse's cape on, you know, with the red lining and white uniform, and I thought, 'I want to be a nurse just like that,' and this is why I'm a nurse: Dallas Cason," she said, recalling the cousin's name.

"She was just the epitome of what a nurse looks like, and she was just about five years older than I. I wanted to be one, and I was 17 when I went into nursing, and just out of high school."

She and her future husband met in Augusta, where both were preparing for careers in the medical field. "I helped him deliver. I helped him in surgery. I helped him all-around," she said.

A souvenir booklet from Thursday's birthday part at University Hospital read, "Audrey ... said the handsome doctor was considered quite the catch among the female members of the staff, and he would often take five or six nurses out on the town after work."

His nurse of choice recalled, "I was a student nurse, and he was at University Hospital, and he finished his residency about the time I finished training, but I didn't know he was interested in me until the last two months, and he was in the army."

Before leaving for service in Pennsylvania, however, he asked for her hand in marriage, and then said the wedding would be in December.

The doctor, however, decided to accelerate the process. "He called up, and said, 'Christmas is here,' in August," his bride recalled.

They married Aug. 29, 1945, in Maryland. "We were married one month, and he shipped out September the 29th." The man of the house became an surgeon in the army, for two years of military service.

The road led back to South Carolina, with civilian life being possibly less hazardous but still far from leisurely. In an interview with CNN last week, the doctor recalled having delivered "somewhere between 15,000 and 18,000 babies."

The lady of the house recalled, "As long as he was in practice, I thought the pregnant ladies needed him a whole lot more than I did at the time, but he always appeared at the house. Sometimes he was gone for maybe a week or two at the hospital during the war. Now that was really something. You didn't have all the help that you have today. He had to be at the hospital for almost weeks at a time and he'd come home and change clothes. He'd come home to check on all of us and the children."

Their family grew to include five children and eventually to today's count of 16 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren and "one on the way," as the doctor of the house noted last week.

His bride added, "It wasn't easy for him, but we just did the best we could. We were always glad to see him. We had fewer spats when he was home. You're always so glad to see him when he comes home that you forget what you thought about that you didn't like."