A lot of people in Ann Arbor overcame huge obstacles to become a success in life. Few overcame bigger obstacles than Lee Sayers.

Sayer, 69, is a real-life coal miner’s daughter. She grew up in Norton, Va., a small town in the Appalachians where men like her father, who had a sixth-grade education, saw working in the mines as the best way to put bread on their family’s table.

Even at that, there wasn’t much bread, as Lee recalls it. Her home didn’t have indoor plumbing until she was in grade school. There was a lone coal-burning stove for heat in the winter, making for some cold nights. To this day, she sleeps with her bedroom windows open well into the winter, she says, and “if my feet are too warm, I feel like I can’t breathe.”

While material possessions were scarce in her home growing up, there was even less affection. Lee’s father and alcoholic mother divorced when Lee was a baby and she was raised by her father and a stepmother, along with a revolving door of other family members. “I really was an orphan. … I didn’t feel safe. I didn’t feel secure.

“The only time I remember my dad saying he loved me, I had long been married.”

She had lots of ear infections when she was a child, and once had to be hospitalized. A nurse befriended Lee, then about 9 years old, and let the child accompany her on rounds through the hospital. “I thought she was the most beautiful person in the world,” Lee remembers, adding that she decided then and there to become a nurse.

She started practicing for her career immediately. “I can remember my neighbor telling me I put Band-Aids on everything in the neighborhood.”

She made her dream come true, becoming not just the first person in her father’s family to graduate high school, but earning a diploma from Radford Community Hospital School of Nursing.

She worked for a brief time at the hospital in Norton before coming to Detroit, where she landed a job at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan and reconnected with her mother. Lee eventually worked her way up to head nurse.

In 1982, she started working for the University of Michigan Health System in Ann Arbor, and spent many years in the pediatric intensive care unit at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital before retiring in 2008.

Lee didn’t focus on bedside manner. Rather, she took special pride keeping her area tidy and anticipating her patients’ needs and doctors’ wishes. Even if that meant skipping the small talk and appearing aloof.

Lee tells the story of a mother who had a sick child in the bed beside one of Lee’s patients. It was awkward because they never spoke and the woman always seemed to keep a skeptical eye on Lee. When the woman’s child was transferred out of ICU, however, she shocked Lee by saying, “I want to apologize. I thought you were uppity, that you thought you were better than anyone else. I was wrong. You take such good care of your patients and I’m just sorry you couldn’t take care of my child.”

To Lee, that was the highest praise imaginable.

Don’t expect Lee to tell you about the feeling she got helping others during her career, or even the lives she saved. The way she sees it, she just did her job the best she could. And, besides, she had no choice: She was born to be a nurse.

While she’s not especially generous with small talk, she makes up for it in other ways. To this day, three years after retirement, she sends frequent gifts -- a special bottle of wine, for instance -- to her favorite doctors at the hospital.

And her personal doctor these days? Well, it’s good to be him. Lee recently interrupted her lunch at a restaurant to order takeout and deliver a full meal to his office, because Lee said he had to work especially long hours that day.

After delivering the food, she came back to enjoy her own meal at the restaurant with a big smile on her face.

She had done a good deed and didn’t really care if anyone noticed.

Full disclosure: The author had a sick child at Mott in the mid-’90s and Lee was his child’s nurse. Like the mother mentioned above, he knows Lee takes good care of her patients.

Kyle Poplin, is publisher of The Ann magazine, which is inserted monthly in various print editions of aa.com. The next issue will be in next Sunday’s paper. He’s also searching, through this column, for the most interesting person in Ann Arbor. If you have anyone in mind, email your idea to theannmag@gmail.com.