For the past fourteen years, Shabir Kamal, 58, has been a nurse in the emergency room at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. He’s a tall man, positive, talkative. But because most people think all nurses are women, pretty much every time he parts the curtains to attend to a new patient, he is greeted with “Thanks, Doc.” The same thing happened to him from 2001 until early 2013 when he was a nurse at the vast Baystate Medical Hospital in Springfield, Massachusetts.
As he told this writer, “This is understandable given that only 10% of nurses in the US are male. Here in Brattleboro, for example, in the high-stakes environment of the emergency department, I may be the only man working with two women doctors and several women nurses.” (Roughly half the doctors at BMH are women.)
Shabir’s father was part of an august Pakistani family. “When the British relinquished India in the mid-1940’s, my paternal grandfather was Pakistan’s first ambassador to the new India. His grandson -my father- has a convoluted and somewhat unknown story. We do know he showed up in the 1960’s in Los Angelos to be close to his brother. He got a job there and that’s where he met my mother.
“My father was Pakistani and a Muslim. My mother was born just after WWII in Holland. Her father was a baker and she was brought up Catholic. In the mid 1950’s, with Holland still war-torn, her family moved to Los Angeles to start a new life. She was eight years old.
“In the late 1960’s my parents met in LA: this impetuous Muslim man from Pakistan and this equally impetuous Catholic woman from Holland. They fell instantly in love, and one year later I was born. After a whirlwind life with my parents (mostly with my mom as a single parent), with no end of other twists and turns, I enrolled at Wheaton College just west of Chicago. I had to become a grounded human being so I studied and got a four-year degree in philosophy! Only now do I see this was my attempt to figure out my past.
“After my sophomore year, I had to take a year off to earn money so I could graduate. I got a job as a woodworker. When I came back as a junior, I met Hanna Thurber from Brattleboro. I saw in her a quiet, deep and settled woman to whom I was instantly drawn. After two years on campus together, we were in lock-step.
“One Thanksgiving, she wanted to show me where she grew up on her family farm just west of Brattleboro - Lilac Ridge Farm. We drove from the Chicago area. When we got off Route 9 in Marlboro we drove straight on the dirt roads east through Marlboro Center and then down Ames Hill to West Brattleboro – not taking the more direct route from Route 9 via Greenleaf Street – She wanted my first view of the farm to be the broader view from the bottom of Ames Hill Road. There the woods opened out to broad farmland. There stretched before us in the valley was the 800 acre farm where Hanna had grown up: hayfields, acres of vegetable fields, woodlots, barns, dirt roads and family houses on a farm the Thurbers had owned since 1936. It was a massive eye-opener.
“Once we settled in, we sat down for a Thanksgiving dinner with the whole family joined by nearby cousins, the Robbs, from their farm just up the road. I saw farmers reading The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. I saw stability and love of family. Hanna and I dated from 1990 to 1994, after we graduated from Wheaton. We moved to Vermont, married on the farm and honeymooned all over Pakistan. Spring, summer and fall I worked for Gordon Hayward on his garden installation crew. In the winter I milked cows for Stuart and Bev Thurber. Hanna attended a study-abroad program through SIT that took her to Nepal and after graduating from college she then took a job at SIT-World Learning where she has worked in many different positions over the year.
“In the mid 1990’s, in our mid-twenties, we lived, worked and studied in Flagstaff, Arizona. I worked on the Navajo Nation as a substitute teacher as well as taking courses in anatomy, and physiology at the university that would lay the foundation for my later nursing career. Hanna earned an MA degree in counseling from a college in Flagstaff.
“We gradually came to realize we missed Vermont. In 1998 we decided to move back to the farm Vermont. In 1998 we moved back to the farm where we eventually built our own home on the ridge overlooking the whole farm with views across to New Hampshire.
“Hanna worked at The School for International Training (World Learning) off Kipling Road in Brattleboro having previously been part of their Study Abroad program in Nepal. I milked cows and enrolled in the two-year Nursing Training Program at nearby Greenfield Community College. I graduated in 1999 with an RN Degree. I’ve been with nursing these 26 years.
“I started my work nursing at Grace Cottage and was there for eight months as “floor nurse” - twelve hours on, twelve hours off, five days a week for eight months. I then switched to the sprawling Baystate Hospital in Springfield, MA, a Level 1 Trauma Center. My first specialty was respiratory issues: pneumonia, asthma…. Then I transferred to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit working with patients recovering from open heart surgery. But being sedated, patients were silent. I couldn’t get to know them. Talk with them…. I had to get every medical issue just right, but for people with whom I could not communicate. That’s when I realized I loved talking with, thriving in the medical details, for patients I could get to know. I was also a good listener. In 2003 I switched to The Emergency Department at Baystate and stayed there until 2013 where I could talk with and listen to people. After ten years there, I transferred to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital’s Emergency Department, in many ways to work only four miles from home.
“Initially it was unsettling to be working with, to some degree, people I knew or even more who knew Hanna and her family. I realized many of my patients knew something of my personal life and so they trusted me. I go to the Food Coop in Brattleboro, to The Latchis with Hanna to see a movie, go out for dinner in Brattleboro, see people I cared for and we’d get talking. Now patients in the Emergency Room often show up and ask, “Is Shabir here today?” I’ve been here twelve years now.”
Hanna’s family gave her three acres for a house-site years ago, high above the Lilac Ridge Farm. She and Shabir literally built their own house. Jason Breen helped design the frame and many friends and neighbors showed up to help with the house-raising. Hanna and he worked with a few local tradespeople on the plumbing and electrical (which they didn't want to get wrong). I worked with Tim Hamilton and his excavator to build retaining walls and do foundation work…… We drove up to the slate-roof company in Poultney where we chose our roofing slates. We worked with friends for three months to put up our beautiful slate roof.”