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SANTA FE — Sculptor Glenna Goodacre, who created the sculpture of three American nurses and a wounded soldier at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was in critical condition today at St. Vincent Medical Center after suffering a head injury.

Her husband, attorney C.L. Mike Schmidt, said he took Goodacre to the hospital March 13 after she called and told him, "There is something bad wrong with me."

"It wasn't until after she had an MRI that the doctors discovered that she'd had a massive head injury," he said Monday. "But we don't know if Glenna fainted and fell, or had a mini-stroke and fell. She had to have fallen somewhere."

He said neurosurgeon Philip Shields "hustled her in to (repair) the subdural hematoma."

Goodacre's bronze nurses sculpture, added to the Vietnam memorial in 1993, depicts a nurse seated on sandbags, cradling the soldier's head. Another nurse is standing nearby, looking into the distance; the third is kneeling.

"Men and women who were in Vietnam say to me, `That is me, that is how I felt,' " Goodacre told the crowd that came to the sculpture's dedication.

Goodacre also designed the image of the young Sacagawea on the dollar coins that went into circulation in 2000.

She also created a sculpture of former President Reagan, cowboy hat in hand with dusty boots and denim jacket, after a horseback ride. Goodacre said she broke with tradition, and did not give the 7-foot-6 inch bronze of the former president a stoic expression or dress him in a business suit.

Castings of the sculpture are at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

Goodacre, who was born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1939, has been in good health since suffering a minor heart attack a couple of years ago, said her assistant and secretary, Daniel Anthony.

On the morning of March 13, she had been walking from her home to her studio to continue working on a piece of her three granddaughters in ballet outfits, he said.

Schmidt said she called him about 11:15 that morning, and he found her sitting on a wall around a flower bed when he got home.

"I asked her if she fell; I asked her what happened and she just said, `I don't know,' " he said. "She never really told me anything. So I hustled her to the emergency room."

Goodacre's daughter and son-in-law, model Jill Goodacre and jazz musician Harry Connick Jr., were at the hospital with him, Schmidt said.

"I'm on pins and needles," he said. ". . . Brain surgery is a tricky thing; some people wake up and are fine, while others recover with a serious disability. We just won't know until she wakes up."

Goodacre, who has lived in Santa Fe since 1983, was inducted into the Buddy Holly Walk of Fame in Lubbock in 1997 and had a street in Lubbock named after her in 2005.