In mid September, she received an award she knew about, a National Service Award to nursing, awarded by the New Zealand Nurses Organisation.
Last week, she was blindsided by a different award; the inaugural College of Air and Surface Transport Nurses (Coastn) award for outstanding nursing achievement.
Despite being until recently the chairwoman of Coastn, Ms Johnston was caught unawares by her colleagues.
"The first one I knew was coming - a lot of work had gone into it and there were written submissions and things ... The Coastn one was a complete surprise and very humbling."
A nurse since the mid 1990s, Ms Johnston has spent a lot of her career in cramped quarters on a helicopter or fixed-wing plane, dispensing critical care in a setting not designed for delicate medical work.
"You have one kit, one monitor, one defibrillator and what you have in your bag is what you’ve got so far as equipment goes, and you also don’t have the fully array of drugs we do in the ICU, so a lot of it is pre-planning," she said.
"If I know I have a transit time of an hour each way, I need to calculate if I have enough stuff or do I need more - and if we have to land in a paddock because it has started to snow, do I have enough for that eventuality?"
Although her nursing work often involves crisis situations and traumatic injury, circumstances which are processed thanks to regular staff "hot debriefs", it is an assignment which should have been far less dramatic - an organ transplantee transfer - which is the case she will never forget.
Ms Johnston was asked to travel with a young woman from Invercargill who was heading to Auckland for a heart transplant; thanks to issues with weather and plane availability, the journey ended up taking almost every one of the 24 hours in the window of opportunity for the transplant to go ahead.
Despite there being drama after drama, there was a positive outcome and it was very satisfying to be involved in a case like that, she said.
