Suzie Brunswick is and has been an operating-room nurse at Brattleboro Memorial Hospital since 1976 - 47 years and 9 months to be exact.
She was born in Oneida, New York in 1952. Even as a girl, “I knew I had to have a career. My mother’s best advice: I needed to be able to support myself. The prince won’t come, or, at least, don’t count on the prince coming.”
Gene Marshall, a family friend and mentor to Suzie, lived in nearby Pratts Hollow, NY, an upstate village of about eleven homes, a bar, a post office, and church. Gene was an operating room nurse in a nearby hospital in the 50’s and 60’s, and Suzie wanted to be "just like her.”
After going to State University of NY at Morrisville for nursing training, in 1973 Suzie married Lee Brunswick. They moved to the Brattleboro area in 1974. Two years later she took a job as a nurse in the operating room at BMH. Ever since then she has gotten up before 6:00 AM at the home where she lives today, then with her husband and son, in south Guilford, down near the Massachusetts border.
By 7:00 she is at BMH ready for a day’s work. Once a patient scheduled for an operation arrives, is checked in and prepared for surgery, Suzie may be the one who settles him or her on a stretcher and wheels the patient into the operating theater. There Suzi will be joined by five or six colleagues. (Only since October, 2022 have the three brand-new state-of-the-art operating rooms in the new Ronald Read Pavilion opened.)
This spanking new four-story wing, as many of you remember, resulted from a very significant bequest by Read, a man who lived very simply in the woods in Dummerston, saved his money, cut his own firewood, and often went to have breakfast in the cafeteria at the hospital. There he developed a bond with the BMH staff and clinicians. He also enjoyed talking investments when the opportunity arose with others having breakfast. The three state-of-the-art operating rooms where Suzie Brunswick works were funded by the Brattleboro-based Thomas Thompson Trust. Read lived in Brattleboro when he died.
One of her supervisors told me “Susie is a circulator - she runs the room.” Even before the operation starts, she makes sure everything that is needed before, during and after the surgery is in place. She collaborates with everyone. If an instrument is needed, she gets it. And during the operation she “keeps the pace. She sets the bar high.”
There could be five to seven operating room members gathered: the surgeon, anesthesiologist, physician’s assistant, scrub tech, the nurse who gets the instrument…. Suzie’s role is to help do what needs to be done during an intense and highly concentrated hour or more. Suzie said, "And the more complex the operation, the more of us are needed. Everyone is calm, quiet, deeply focused and carefully coordinated. We rely heavily on each other. We’re a team.”
“My mother used to ask me, ‘Why do you do this? So much stress..... There must be something else you can do,’ and my answer was and always is “We make patients better.” Suzie told me “Our team has the patient’s health in mind with everything we do. Our goal is to make them better.”
(To put Suzie’s story into a larger context, in the fiscal year 2022, 3,816 day-surgeries and medical procedures were carried out within a BMH budget of $45.6 million dollars.)
And as she said, “Teamwork is absolutely crucial and deeply valued in the operating room. Everyone is as important as everyone else.”
The other part of her “retirement” is that she remains as the Laser Safety Officer at the hospital. She must ensure that all employees who operate, maintain and service laser products are properly trained. She provides annual education to all staff who use lasers in any way. Suzie retired March 3, 2023 but continues to work per diem (when she is needed). When scheduled, she works 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM.
But she does have a life outside BMH. She and her husband were involved in The Boy Scout troop in the area and they volunteered for any number of Guilford organizations. “ Years ago, he and I used to snowmobile a lot too. We went all around southeastern Vermont or up to Island Pond…. Once we went west to Montana and on another trip we snowmobiled in Yellowstone National Park for days and days.”
Her son graduated from BUHS in 1999 and he too volunteered. “And after my husband passed away a few years back and my son no longer lives at home, when I get home I look after my dear dog Madison. I’m 71, a private person, and I still work at BMH about four days a week or when they need me but I don’t have to be on call. Is that called retirement?”
And then, near the end of our interview, I got to see another side of Susie. As we were leaving the Board Room where I interviewed her, I looked back at this grand, high-ceilinged room in which we sat. There was a perhaps 18’ long shiny, oval conference table with some twenty chairs set around it. There stood Suzie Brunswick, 5’ tall, 71 years of age, with 47 years of work in the operating room behind her and more in front of her, in this grand room. In that hospital, she was playing a role as key to the work of the hospital as any board member or president who would hold meetings around this august table. A hospital is, more than most, an utterly integrated organization of people: nutrition services, housekeeping, nurses, doctors, lab technicians, office staff, administrators, the guys plowing the snow in the winter so people can park…. EVERYONE is crucial as work goes on 24 hours a day, year after year, to keep us all healthy.