About

After earning an Associate of Science in Nursing degree from a community college in Maryland, I was determined to have the strongest framework for my nursing practice I could get. So, I applied for a New Graduate position at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, in the Surgical ICU. It was exciting and very scary! It was the 1970’s and open-heart surgery was pretty new, and I was assigned to care for fresh open-heart surgical patients. Renal transplant was also new, and I was often assigned to care for those patients, too. We had mandatory education every week and missing sessions resulted in dismissal. During that first year, I learned the highest standard of nursing practice, which I have employed throughout my career.

After a little more than a year at Johns Hopkins I returned to Connecticut and one of my colleagues suggested that I go to work at the VA Medical Center in West Haven. At first, I thought it would not be the place for me. However, I quickly learned that many outstanding healthcare innovations have been developed within the VA Healthcare system, such as the implantable pacemaker, nicotine patch, bar code medication administration system, and the first successful liver transplant was performed at the Denver VA Medical Center. Medical schools in the United States that receive funding from the government-affiliated with the VA Healthcare System to provide physician training.

I began working as a staff nurse at the West Haven VAMC in the Epilepsy Research Unit that had a sharing agreement with Yale University to study how seizure activity affected people physically and cognitively. We collaborated with researchers as they developed new methods of evaluating epilepsy and medications to treat seizures such as Tegretol and Depakote. After about three years, I was reassigned to the Medical Intensive Care Unit (MICU) at the West Haven VAMC. We cared for Veterans who presented with complex critical conditions. My connection to research projects continued in the MICU and we collaborated with the developers of Lactulose that was initially developed to lower blood ammonia levels in alcohol-addicted patients. We quickly learned Lactulose was also particularly useful in treating constipation. I remained in the MICU at West Haven VAMC for the next eleven years. When I left the West Haven VAMC, I had been the Nurse Manager of that unit for about a year and a half.