Kathleen M. Kenny Smith, of McCandless, loved children, nursing, and a good dose of adventure.

When she was 18 weeks pregnant with her first child, Mrs. Smith and her husband took a vacation to the Outer Banks, where she saw a hang glider and decided she had to try it.

"We had a huge fight about it," said her husband, Stephen L. Smith.

Mrs. Smith, a pediatric nurse at Allegheny General Hospital who also taught engaged couples through Catholic Engaged Encounter, died last Sunday of an antibiotic-resistant infection. She was 58.

Raised on the North Side and in Bellevue, Mrs. Smith graduated from St. Francis School of Nursing.

Her husband said she became a nurse so "she could do for others. That was her basic purpose in life and nursing was a logical extension of that."

Mrs. Smith was driven to continually improve her nursing knowledge. She earned several degrees and her school nurse certification and worked in 10 practice areas.

"Once she mastered one practice area, she was off to another," her husband said.

Along the way, she passed up promotions that would have taken her away from direct patient contact.

"She always liked bedside nursing. She always wanted to be with patients," Mr. Smith said.

She especially enjoyed working with children and found pediatric nursing a natural fit, he said.

In addition to her work as a nurse, Mrs. Smith was a member of St. John Neumann Church in Franklin Park, where she was a Eucharistic minister and second-grade religious education teacher.

She and her husband worked with Catholic Engaged Encounter to help prepare couples in the Diocese of Pittsburgh for marriage. The Smiths began teaching with the program more than 25 years ago. They had been serving as areawide coordinators of the program.

"We enjoyed it and the engaged couples were a lot of fun," Mr. Smith said.

In addition to her husband, Mrs. Smith is survived by three sons, Nathan, Sean and Matthew, all at home; two sisters, Donna Hurd, of Roanoke, Va., and Sharon Reel, of Bellevue; and a brother, Jeff Kenny, of New Lebanon, Ohio.

She was preceded in death by her son, Ben Smith.

A Mass was celebrated Thursday in Church of the Assumption in Bellevue. Burial was in Christ Our Redeemer Cemetery, Ross.