Work

Worcester is a welcoming city, it’s the city of inventors. Just went to the Harvey Ball last night, to the Worcester Historical Museum. And I think that’s a good place where all the inventions are well-kept, and you can see what Worcester was and is still! Worcester, I think, follows that tradition because now it’s more, less the industry. But I love, I love, a lot of new entrepreneurs are starting in Worcester.

I think I always knew that I would work. I never thought about not working. But my parents also gave back to the community, and my grandmother did too. I feel that kind of inspired me to…work in the nonprofit world. My dad worked in human services, my mother worked in education. I think we were just raised to give back and be there for people.

It was in 2003 when we started the war, when [President George W.]  Bush declared war [on Iraq] near St. Patrick’s Day, I think around the 19th [of March], and we were in country on the 23rd.  We had been at Fort Drum a couple of months.  I was with the 804th Medical Center which is the command and control of all medical units and we were in Kuwait.  The 804th Hospital Command.  They changed the name since I first started.  So my unit in country was in charge of all the medical aspects to the equipment, the professional staff, doctors, nurses, and the cleaning operations.  When I was deployed I was asked to be the medical regulating officer.  The regulating officer’s job is to coordinate all evacuation so I had myself and about seven other people [laughs] and some of those people were 19 and 20 years old and myself, and a major, and my enlisted group.  We coordinated all the ground ambulances in the area and the connection with the Air Force to evacuate and it was very stimulating and it was very rewarding.  It was tough because we were dealing with casualties.  We were dealing with all the amputations and we were dealing with at that time—I’m digressing a bit from your question, but at that time, the military was just implementing what they called “the golden hour” where it was believed that if you could get someone with severe trauma from the place of injury to level three care within an hour that you had a better chance of saving the life.  That was our mission and we did it.  We did it.  The only time we couldn’t is when people couldn’t tell us where they were.  [Laughs]  You might find that pretty amazing, but a lot of times people couldn’t tell us where they were even if they were on a road.  They didn’t have—GPS is pretty common now, but GPS was just beginning to come into use in 2003 so maybe one person in the convoy would have GPS and convoys get separated and spread out.  And these were young kids, 18, 19 years old.  We wanted to get to them obviously as fast as we could.   If you couldn’t give us a grid coordinate at least tell us what road you are on and the nearest town and the helicopter could follow that.  Convoys are pretty big so they could find a convoy.  We really implemented the golden hour rule and, of course, part of our job is letting the hospitals know they are coming and having the ambulances at the landing site to get them into the hospitals.  The golden hour included the telephone call, the launching of the helicopter, contacting the hospital, the ambulance to the landing field, and getting them to the emergency room.

I went in the WAVES in 1944, and I spent my whole time in the hospital at Norfolk, Virginia, the Naval Hospital there where the ships come in there—the port. It was very—at times it was kind of hard to take, but you see these people coming in to be taken care of from other parts of the country and it’s heartbreaking a little bit but you kind of manage to get through it anyway.  [The wounded] came from combat from different places.  That’s where the ships came in; the hospital ships came in there.  I mean, we enjoyed some of the time that we were off.  But it was a little bit—seeing, doing the job we had to do, it was a little bit difficult seeing all the things that happened to them.  They’d come in from different areas and they’d be off the battlefield, and they’d come in with casts that were messy looking; they had to be changed, and all that, but I was able to take that OK. 

Don’t be defined by your gender, and don’t think about what you can’t do, ask for what you want to do. Because you’ll be surprised, I think, at times, to find that if you just ask, you’ll get what you want. Just be yourself and ask for what you need and make sure that you get paid what you’re worth.