Interview with Gerry Lisi

SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES

ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

Interview #1920

LISI, GERRY

LISI, GERRY (1947-)

Interviewed: 2019

Interviewer: Lea Goldstone

Index by: Sophie Clark

Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen

Length: 55 minutes

First Interview Session (July 29, 2019): Digital File

00:00:00

LG: Today is July 29, 2019. My name is Lea Goldstone. And I'm interviewing Gerry Lisi. This is a phone interview being conducted for the Madison General School of Nursing Alumni Oral History Project, from 1905 to 1982. And for sound quality purposes, could you please say your name and spell your last name.

GL: Hi. This is Gerry Lisi. L-i-s-i.

LG: Perfect. So, could you just tell me first your birth date, and then just describe some of your upbringing.

GL: Yeah. That might put a unique flavor on it. I was born in Madison, May 28, 1947. So, and I was raised on the east side of Madison. My dad was supervisor of the power plant at Oscar Mayer's. My whole family worked at Oscar Mayer's. Big Catholic family. I went to the seminary for high school and had left there after five years. Came back and started school in Madison, 1965. And by the time I had 00:01:00entered nursing school, I already had eight or nine years of higher education in Madison. In fact, had graduated from UW with a degree in sociology.

LG: So did anything in your background kind of guide you towards nursing? Or how did that process work for you?

GL: Well, my mother was a nurse. She was a UW Madison grad School of Nursing in 1946. Had worked, had stayed home to raise ten kids. I got out of Madison, or was graduating from Madison with a degree in sociology and no real job prospects. I knew I wanted to work in something that let me help people in a general sort of way. But I really did not want to pursue a master's in sociology. I wasn't interested in that. But I was looking for a helping profession. And so I was working at Oscar Mayer's in sanitation, it's a union 00:02:00job, making four dollars and forty cents an hour, or something like that. And nurses all around Madison, that's what they were making. So I thought well, I think I'd rather do that than clean up after hog butchering. So went on to apply at Madison General and was accepted without difficulty. I had a couple of classes to pick up. But I think that's probably the explanation. That I was looking for a helping degree, and nursing seemed to fill the bill.

LG: And at that time, was nursing mostly a female profession still? Or was it starting to mix, the genders were starting to mix?

GL: Well, that's an interesting question because I think when we went, I think there were a hundred classmates in my class. And I think there were five men. 00:03:00And that ratio of five to ten percent seemed to persist throughout my career in nursing. That's about how many men there were when I got started, and how many men there were when I finished up. Probably no more than 10 percent. I don't know if that's an accurate statistic. But there were five guys in my class. All of them, every one of them was thinking about going into anesthesia. I didn't even know what that was. But they were looking at jobs that would be two or three times the average nurse salary. And at that time, that was a great job for anybody, male or female. But the guys were coming back from, some of the guys had had Vietnam War experience, had been medics. And they were looking at anesthesia as a great career to have really good income. It wasn't for me. It really, my first day in surgery I remember they slit the chest to put in a pacemaker and I slid right down the wall. I wanted nothing to do with that sort 00:04:00of activity. And it involved a great deal of concentration.

So when I came to Madison General, I had spent 1965 to that year of starting there on the Madison campus. That was a time of great social upheaval. You know, I'd been teargassed more than once. I was on the left and protested the Vietnam War. And then I had traveled quite a bit. I hitchhiked to Central America. Been on the road a bit, knocked around a bit. Held all kinds of jobs. So I had felt when I started there, you know, I'm there with these young ladies who just got out of high school. And in comparison, I felt like a bigshot. I had been around and was sophisticated and what not. But I don't think I dwelled on it too much. 00:05:00I liked my classmates.

I do remember that first summer getting an invitation to come to the dorms. They had addressed it to Lisa Gerard. Had reversed my name. And I was supposed to come for a weekend and have some root beer and pop popcorn and get to meet my classmates. And my big sis would meet there and help to make me comfortable. And I just remember sort of laughing at that. And then thinking well, you know, they're just reaching out to make me feel accepted and comfortable there. It's just an easy mistake to make. So I called up to the dorm and got a hold of my big sis and told here there'd been a mistake. It would probably be a bad idea for me to come spend the weekend in the dorm. And we just had a laugh about that, and that was it.

00:05:50

LG: So when you were traveling and kind of protesting the war, that was all before you went to nursing school, right?

GL: Absolutely. Yeah. That's the '60s. Madison in the '60s was a tumultuous 00:06:00place. There were, they called them riots. But today's standards, they were hardly anything. But there were protests of the Vietnam War. And then the teaching assistants went on strike. And there were protests over that. Dow Chemical came to campus and interviewed students for work in the war industry. We protested that. Then there were the black ghettoes across the nation erupted after the death of Martin Luther King and assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Those were big deals. You felt like society was changing around you and the world was never going to be the same. Authority was in question. We think today things are rough. But I think in 1972, there were one thousand bombings in the United States, if you can imagine such a thing. So it was a time of great social 00:07:00upheaval. And the music had all changed, and culture had changed and Madison was as much a center of it as Berkeley.

So the School of Nursing felt a little bit of a throwback. You know, I went to interview and met Miss Schmidt, who I liked right away. She was a dignified old guard lady, and a lady. And she pointed out to me that I was chewing my fingernails, and that I really needed to stop that if I was going to be a nurse. And I immediately vowed to follow that advice. And then I've chewed them ever since. But she was really nice.

And the students were nice. I think where I'm moving in this story is that I learned to like and appreciate my classmates, my peers. And kind of had my comeuppance. Monica Liska was next to me in line. And she was this little gal 00:08:00from northern Wisconsin who'd just graduated from high school and was starting nursing. Got to know her. She was real bubbly. And I remember a year after graduating, running into Monica. And I had gone from, I had gotten a job right out of nursing school in the intensive care unit at Marshfield. And so I thought I was pretty hot stuff. I'd learned all this intensive care stuff.

"Well, Monica, what have you been doing this year?" Well, she went to the hospital in Hillsboro or Viroqua, one of those really small town hospitals. And she had, yup, they had a little intensive care there. So she'd learned monitoring and she worked in OB and had been delivering babies. And she'd been to the ER and had gunshot victims and car accident victims. And I thought, holy cow, the experience she got in a small hospital one year after graduation was ten times what I had been exposed to. So, those were great young ladies and went 00:09:00on to do good work everywhere. And I have just the utmost respect for them.

LG: So I guess jumping into what it was like with your life in Madison. What years did you attend nursing school?

GL: I started in the fall of 1973. I was 26 years old. And I graduated in '75.

LG: Okay. Got you. And so you said you'd lived in Madison for a long time.

GL: Right.

LG: Was it different living there while you were in nursing school versus before?

GL: Not much. Because I didn't live in the dorm. I lived off campus. And I'd been living, I hadn't been living in my house, actually, since I'd left for the freshman year in high school. So I had always lived in apartments. I just moved closer to the school so I could bike back and forth. And had a roommate. One of the guys from the class was a roommate of mine there. And we just went to school 00:10:00for two years. So for me, living arrangements were not much different. I didn't have anything to do with dorm life, other than that my girlfriend was living in the dorm. That was Marge, who we married after graduating.

LG: Mm hmm. So, because you were kind of separated, literally, by gender, in what ways were you able to connect with the other students kind of outside of class?

10:36

GL: Well, they partied. Partied pretty hard. Just like any, you know, released from home and there was some substantial drinking going on with those young ladies. And I was part of that. So was my wife. But that was about it, I guess. 00:11:00We, she more than I, had formed relationships with people there. And boyfriends and girlfriends, and there were a little bit of things that we did. But we studied, too. I mean, it was hard work. I was a pretty good student, and pretty clinically motivated. And I worked on weekends, too. I had always worked my way through school, dropping in and out to earn enough money to go to school, not incur any debt. I don't remember anything about that particular life in school, other than a few incidents, that was in any way unusual.

LG: Mm hmm. And so besides the partying and stuff, what other like social or recreational activities did you and your friends just do while you were students?

GL: I think probably nothing different than what students going to Madison at 00:12:00that time did. I really enjoyed bike riding. Marge and I did some biking. My first year of school there, I had a steady girlfriend who was a student at Madison in the art department. And our recreational activities were the typical things for young people in Madison. Bars, physical exercise, biking, that sort of thing.

My wife met me because she bought a motorcycle. She was an LPN and she was doing some homecare nursing. So she bought a motorcycle and needed someone to help her learn how to drive it. So she knew I had a motorcycle, so she got a hold of me. So we had a nice time teaching her how to ride that motorcycle and getting it back to the dorm for her. And then she had it for about a week and she drove it 00:13:00into the building. She hit the dorm with this motorcycle. And she's right here, laughing at me as I tell you this story.

No, I side-whopped it.

GL: She side-whopped it, she says. She broke the mirror. And so she got a hold of me. Well, could I work on this motorcycle? I thought well, maybe this is going a little bit too far. I had a steady girlfriend. Didn't want to get involved. So she told me she would get one of the other guys in the class to help her, which immediately raised my interest. So pretty soon I'm working on this motorcycle. And it was all downhill from there. (laughs) And we were married a year later.

LG: Oh, that's sweet. (laughs)

GL: Yeah. Yeah.

LG: So, kind of shifting back to kind of more about your education, can you describe what your classes were like while you were a student there?

GL: I remember incidents from classes. The first, the first session that we had 00:14:00in clinical, they're called fundies, I remember being assigned to give a bed bath to a man with a huge decubitus ulcer. And I had never seen a decubitus ulcer, didn't know what that was, and never had any instruction giving a bed bath. So this decubitus was extraordinary. I mean, you could see his spinal column. And I went through about nine towels, I think, trying to give this bed bath. Just winging it. And then right after that, we all gathered. And our instructor said, "Well, what was it like?" And I thought this had a feel to me like we're all sitting in a circle and we'll kind of describe our experiences and we'll share a few anecdotes, and this is an introduction. So of course here I am, much older than the others, and the guy. You know, the males, we raised 00:15:00our hands first. And so I volunteered my story about giving this bed bath and using all these towels. And her reaction immediately shot me down. (laughs) For, I'm still not sure what. But she made me very uncomfortable for even speaking up or saying anything about it. And I just said to myself well, that's a lesson to me to kind of hold back a bit. I don't know if this instructor's got some problem with what I said or just who I am, but I will not be sticking my neck out like that again. And it was my first lesson that this was a woman's world. This was a place where the women, especially the instructors, who were all college degreed women from Madison, these were feminists. And if I was going to work in this world, I'd better learn to respect and appreciate that my male 00:16:00privilege was not going to get me through.

Now you're a Madison person, and you know what I'm talking about. But as I went to work, for the first decade, I would say, men in any profession really did have an advantage. And I certainly benefited from it. I wouldn't have known it or admitted it at the time, but I'm certain that's true today as I look back. But in nursing school, I didn't get away with that much. There were professors who clearly did not like me for whatever reason. I was either too forward or too something, I'm not sure. But there were some rough spots with some of those instructors. But I was a good student. And I knew the answers on exams, and I could handle stuff. So it wasn't too bad for me.

I just remember some other anecdotes. I jotted some of those. I remember a female student whose background was so religious that she could not do the urology section because she just couldn't look down there. So she just flunked the section. And she' a nurse today. I'm hoping she's looking down there. But that was a big issue for her. And that surprised me as a student to meet folks like that. But I knew they were out there.

I think I'd been there about a year, and one of the young women was transferring to UW Madison School of Nursing and leaving Madison General. And I kind of asked her, I said, "Why are you doing that?" You know, "We're a year into it, almost you'll waste a year."

And she said, "Do you really want to stay here with these girls?" And I didn't 00:18:00know what she was talking about. And I just kind of asked her to elaborate a little bit. And she just said something like, "Just look around. This is not, these girls are not striving as hard as professional nurses should be striving." And I hadn't really thought about it that way.

But in that conversation, I said, "But I like these girls. These women." And I think it was right then that I committed that I'd be sticking it out with this group. This was going to be my profession. I think that's when I committed to it from a commitment to career, that I would be a hospital nurse, and a good one, and that these were my people. It kind of came in that conversation.

18:57

LG: Could you elaborate more on what the difference was between like, so she was 00:19:00transferring where?

GL: To UW Madison.

LG: Okay. And so was there, do you feel like there was a difference between the two schools? Or did you feel like it was basically the same? Just the concept, I'm just a little confused by.

GL: Yeah. I didn't recognize it, I didn't know it wasn't the same, that there was a difference between hospital nursing and the nurse going on for her BSN. That was all new to me. But I knew there was something going on, because all of our instructors were BSN nurses. And some of them had master's degrees. And there was something unspoken about the quality of what we were doing or where we would end up that I didn't understand.

Three, four years later, we were at Luther Hospital, we were working at Luther Hospital in Eau Claire. And I was a member of the Wisconsin Nurses Association, 00:20:00one of the only members of the Wisconsin Nurses Association. And I was invited by a group to join a committee there to represent the hospital school of nurses in a campaign to change state law for licensure. And I worked with those two PhDs in nursing, one from Madison, one from Eau Claire, and some other nurses on this committee. I worked with them for about nine months and then became absolutely convinced that they were absolutely wrong, that we should not change state licensure. And I won't bore you with the details of where I thought we should go with it, but I opposed the recommendations of the committee I was on by the time I was done. And I remember then being in a state hearing with our legislators and taking the floor and giving my point of view and having that fully supported by the assemblyperson who had come to attend that. And then that 00:21:00was the end of it. We stopped, the effort by academics to change state law ended then. This is the early '80s. And really nothing has changed much since, except that the hospital school of nurses, hospital schools, diploma nursing is pretty much gone.

LG: Mm hmm. Interesting. I've never heard about, I guess now that you say with Madison General not existing that the hospital nursing would be different. But could you describe kind of more, like the technical parts of, like can you just tell me about some of the classes that you took as learning how to be a hospital nurse?

GL: I think, my memory's so bad. (laughs) There was the fundamentals, where you 00:22:00learned, like every nurse, how to properly care for patients, what techniques were particular to nurses. Those things were all, for me, especially, now I'm thinking about the second year, you would learn each disease process. And I remember the learning disease processes at the level of a hospital nurse is not that difficult. But there were some huge moments, I remember being assigned a patient with liver failure related to alcoholism. And I had studied all the details of this kind of complex illness, and had gotten to know him and visited with him almost every day for probably two weeks. And I won't say anything more about him, because it's confidential stuff. But it wasn't, then just studying 00:23:00and reading a little bit at home one night, I realized you know, this guy, he's going to die! And I kind of put the whole thing together that he was really, really, seriously ill, and that somehow I just had to go talk with him.

So I went in on a Saturday, Saturday morning, just went up to see him again. And they said he'd been transferred into ICU because he'd started to bleed. And I remember walking into ICU and I could see them working on him. They were shoving what we call a Sengstaken-Blakemore tube down his throat, through his esophagus, to tamponade off a bleeding esophageal varices. And he was hemorrhaging violently. There was blood coming out of his mouth, there was blood all over the bed, just a whole lot of gore. And I just stood there, just shocked. I mean, this woke me up that this is not just an academic exercise. This is the real 00:24:00thing. These are people's delicate lives. And I was just shaking, walking out of there. And I just had to find a, went back into the school and found one of the professors. I think it was Mrs. [Ekblad?]. And just told her the whole story. She knew that I had reached a seminal moment and was committing myself to something significant and had learned a great deal in a few minutes. It was really a game changing for me to be there. That's one story. I've got a couple others?

LG: Yeah, of course. Please share.

00:24:47

GL: Sure. One of the things I learned that I think I learned better than my fellow students because I had a background in sociology and had lived in Madison at a time of, like I said, a time of great upheaval, a time of change. I was 00:25:00assigned a patient, kind of a lengthy assignment. This was in the last couple of months before we were done. And he was a young guy with a ruptured appendix. And I remember that he was extremely physically fit. He and his girlfriend were both buff. They worked out a lot. They were runners and bikers. And here he'd had this ruptured appendix.

So I got to know them. And I was learning all the details of their medical situation. He didn't smoke. But he asked me about marijuana. Does marijuana hurt your lungs? So my classmates would have taken that wrongly. They would have lectured him about, or been offended that he would be even using marijuana. This was not up to their standards. But for me, it was different. It was part of our formal instruction that you meet patients where they are. You don't form a judgment. You don't try to impose your standards on them.

So I went off, did research on, didn't have Google, but we had books and 00:26:00physicians to talk to. And my question was, does smoking marijuana hurt your lungs? Is it as dangerous as cigarettes and how would you [unclear]?

And then I came back a couple of days later and told him what I had found in a very objective, straightforward way. If he wanted to use marijuana, that was his business as far as I was concerned. But I would talk about it in an objective way, give him information about harming his lungs.

And I just remembered it that, then I told that story to my instructor who just patted me on the back and said, "Yup, you learned what we want you to learn." And we moved on. That was an interesting experience to me.

And I've carried that, I ran an emergency department for thirty years up here. And the thing I stress is that you respect every patient. Every welfare mom that 00:27:00comes in with a baby is not someone to be looked down upon. You treat everybody with respect and care, and that's your job. That's your professional responsibility.

One of the most interesting experiences when I was there was the six weeks, eight weeks that we spent in Mendota State Hospital. They had a locked unit there. And we did our psychiatric clinicals at Mendota. And right away, I formed a relationship with about a 22 year-old schizophrenic who'd been hospitalized there, and treated him as my primary patient contact for that period of time. Still to this day can't figure out what was therapeutic about the relationship that I established with him. But I got to know him and enjoyed the contact one-on-one. And I liked psych enough to come back and get a job then at Madison 00:28:00General while I was a nursing student as an orderly in the psych unit. And I spent a lot of time out on the ward just chatting up people, and getting to know some really interesting psychotic people, and enjoying that very much. That's kind of how then I worked my way through nursing school was spending those weekends working psych at Madison General.

LG: And could you tell me a little bit more about the clinical, I think you called them clinical, right, where you go to the hospital and you work there?

GL: Yeah.

LG: Could you tell me a little bit more about your other experiences with that?

00:28:41

GL: I've got one good story. The last clinical rotation is, I think it's called team leading. And it's extremely stressful. For the first time then, you're in charge of the unit when you walk on. You make assignments to the nurses and you supervise, you're supposed to supervise what's going on. Of course we were all 00:29:00newbies, and very clumsy. And the old experienced nurses barely tolerated us. But that was our job.

People were frightened of doing clinicals. One of the guys was so terrified that his blood pressure would skyrocket when he'd come in for clinicals. And he would get bloody noses. Ended up in the infirmary with this bleeding, with nosebleeds. He dropped out. He had to drop out of nursing school. He was unable to complete clinicals. Now that's two years of study gone. His only intention of going to nursing school, basic nursing, was just get by, get his RN license and then get on to anesthesia school. He was married, had one or two kids. That whole plan was done when he was unable to do clinicals. Just really surprised me. For me, it was stressful, also.

But I just remember a story from clinicals. We're in the med room. And there's 00:30:00two of us. We're teamed up and we're doing this clinical leadership. And this poor nurse. There's a thing called an Abboject. It's a syringe with a needle, preformed needle on it. And it's got kind of a funny rubber tip. When you pull this rubber tip off, it sticks a little bit. And experienced nurses know that you twist the tip, and then it comes off. Well she just tried to pull it. And when she pulled it, she got a little rubber band effect out of it. And I walk into the med room and she's standing there, tears just rolling down. And she's got this needle, it had popped back, gone through her middle finger, through the fleshy part of tip of her middle finger, and was stuck in her index finger.

LG: Oh!

GL: And she's just standing there holding this syringe. This needle is about an inch and a half, two inches long, and here it is, shoved in.

So I walked up and I grabbed her hand. I took the syringe and I just pulled it 00:31:00out, just slid it out. No problem. But now we've got a dirty needle and it's a narcotic, it's Dilaudid. It's heavily regulated. So I just said, "Well, get another one out. Go take care of the patient. And we'll just discard this one." Didn't quite do it right. We discarded it in the med box and walked away. But then that night, the narcotic count was off. And so we're in the team report, narcotic count was off. And the two of us just sat there, stony-faced, we have no idea what was going on. So they have yet to arrest us for this act of incompetence, but we managed to get through it. Those are--

LG: So--oh, sorry.

GL: I was just looking through my notes here. Those are the anecdotes I remember. It was a combination of classroom and clinicals. We would spend the 00:32:00day in class and then you'd have these sessions up on the floor helping the nurses. Taking patient assignment. I wasn't the best one, my wife, who'd been an LPN and had worked, she had three years of LPN work behind her. She was experienced. She was the kind of nurse that you would appreciate because she could actually do something. I was much more clumsy and had to learn every single act just one by one. But I was good in the classroom part of it. I could learn those meds, I could learn that physiology. That was all pretty straightforward for me. So I was able to graduate without too much embarrassment, and to go on.

Nursing after that, I went right into intensive care. My wife went into ICU. I worked for, we worked at Marshfield Hospital, she was in CCU, for a year. Then we took six months off and just bummed around the country, camping under the stars and seeing the world a little bit. Oh, yeah, she just reminds me, we did get married in that time. And then we ended up at Eau Claire for four years. Worked at Luther Hospital. I went on to get another degree in respiratory therapy. And then we moved up to Rice Lake and were here for thirty-some years.

LG: Hmm. So before I completely leave your education kind of life, were there any challenges that you faced in particular when it came to either clinicals or classes or anything?

00:34:04

GL: There were none. It wasn't that difficult clinically, in classes or anything. I took easily to learning. I was very clinically focused. So I learned the drugs very rapidly. So that was the easy part. So I could excel there. Probably the only problem on clinicals is that there were some instructors who just didn't like me, and would go out of their way to sort of embarrass me. But I won't, those are still embarrassing stories to tell. So I won't tell you. But you know, I just survived those and did the best I could to learn. Fortunately, Madison General was diversified enough so that you had it in parts. There were not general surgery floors. There was neuro, there was psych, peds, OB.

But to give you an example in OB, so I'm doing an OB rotation. It's not really a great place for a guy. Women delivering babies don't have any problem with who's there. You could have the mayor there, they wouldn't care. But postpartum, they're sensitive to having some guy be their nurse. So that was a little bit tricky. But what those goldarn nurses in OB. So they give me this woman to help through labor who discovered when she went into labor that she was pregnant. Maybe you've had a girlfriend who's done that. So she had denied her pregnancy right up to the point of labor. Just had had, of course had had no prenatal care and was completely unprepared from a family or a functional way to have this 00:36:00baby. So this is the one they give the student nurse. The guy student nurse, yet. So I realized I'd been had as soon as I figured it out. But she and I got through that just fine. And she had her baby and things went well. But then of course it was a big patchwork job afterwards to find out where this baby's going to go and how she's going to care for this newborn.

So there were little things like that where the established nursing class wasn't all that receptive to having a guy show up and try to learn this stuff. But I did all right. I got through it. I was mature enough, I think, to roll with it and not be too upset. So it went well for me, from that point of view. There were other nurses, I think, who had more trouble with this or that. Like the 00:37:00nurse who just couldn't look down there and flunked her urology section. But for me, it was all right.

I did have an experience on neurology. We'd always, you know, harassment of nurses by male patients was a problem then. It's still a problem today. But there was a woman in neurology, a female patient who asked me to sit right here. And then sat up and put her arms around me. And I was just stunned. I didn't know what the hell to do. So fortunately for me, my instructor passed by the door and saw my frantic waves and came in and released me from this patient. So those were some unusual things that a guy might run into that I remember. But none of it was enough to drive me out. I just rolled with the punches.

LG: Mm hmm. And did you feel like your experience at Madison General well-prepared you for transitioning into professional nursing?

00:38:03

GL: Absolutely. Professional nursing in the hospital sense. I still work at the Rice Lake Free Clinic up here. I'm a volunteer. I do triage up here. And I have had this discussion with nurses who got bachelor's degrees, went on to work in schools, hospitals, clinics and public health. The difference was that hospital nurses, we accepted much more that our work would be directed by the physician. Our independent role was not that well asserted. Although we thought at the time that we were training for a great deal of independence, it was not to be. Hospital nurses take their directions largely from the physician. Really good 00:39:00hospital nurses know their patients and know their medicine so well that they are capable of correcting and directing and really assisting physicians to do a really good job. That's the best hospital nurse. That takes a while to learn. And I think that the DSN nurses are better prepared from the beginning for that kind of a role. Ours was much more functional, much more technical.

And I did recognize it at first because my first year of nursing I went right into intensive care. So I had a tremendous amount to learn about the technical details of working in an intensive care. And then I went on to respiratory therapy and learned that. And then within a few years I was in charge of an ER and an ambulance service and a respiratory therapy department. I think that our 00:40:00education prepared us to take responsibility and to move on, all of us, to the best degree we could. But it is not the same as the more independent role of the professional nurse. So we were proud to call ourselves professionals. But I think there's matters of degree.

LG: So, just tell me a little bit about your career in nursing after you graduated.

GL: Yeah. Marge and I went to Marshfield. She went to CCU, I went to ICU. We both learned a tremendous amount of technical stuff, did some education. Those were times when things were growing dramatically. I started, the group of new nurses that started at ICU with Mrs. Roberts at Marshfield back in '75, there were 19 of us. Brand new nurses that all needed to be taught how to work in 00:41:00Marshfield, Wisconsin. Turnover was extraordinary. But we survived a year and then left there. Marge and I both left and traveled for a bit and then went to Eau Claire. She went back to school to get a public health certificate. I worked in intensive care. And then we stayed there four years. I spent a year in respiratory therapy, got my respiratory therapy certificate, which was a big deal. Here I was an RN and a respiratory therapist, had a very early registry number. There are a hundred thousand respiratory therapists now. There were only seven thousand then.

So then I took a job in 1980. We moved up to Rice Lake because I got the job to run the respiratory therapy department up here. And we have stayed at Rice Lake, raised our three boys up here. Had our first baby that first year. And excuse 00:42:00me, I just screwed that up. We had our first baby in Eau Claire. Then moved up here with one baby and number two coming. So then I ran the respiratory therapy department up here at Rice Lake for two years and then the job for the emergency department director came open. And I applied for it and got that job. That's the maleness part of this saga. Probably there were much better-qualified women that probably should have had that job. But I got it. There was no competition for it, so at least I have that to--there wasn't anybody that wanted the job running this ER. But I ran the ER. And that included the ambulance service. So once again, a whole new set of technical skills to learn. Good support from the physicians.

And then I ran that and a number of other departments. I opened up the diabetic education center, started a quit smoking class. In the mid-'80s, I ran for the job of county coroner, and I was county coroner then for twelve years. So I ran a bunch of these departments at the hospital and was a hospital director. That was all very, very successful. I started the first endoscopy program in Barron County for gastros and endoscopy. Expanded the respiratory therapy department to a neighboring hospital, the Cumberland Hospital.

Then in 2010, I left the emergency department and took on a job as project manager for the installation of the new computer system for the hospital. We brought in Cerner. I was project manager for that. Then I retired in 2012 and 00:44:00stayed on as a consultant on what we call meaningful use, or the computer system, for another year. Marge retired in 2012.

So then we got out of hospitals in 2012 and had a look back. Since then, I've worked a little bit in the Rice Lake Free clinic. Do triage, get patient contact that way. I really love that sort of work. And I'm also the head now of the Barron County Democratic Party. So I'm plenty busy trying to get Trump out of office.

LG: (laughs) Wow. So it sounds like you really had a lot of experience kind of just independently coming up with programs or participating in things like that. Do you feel like--

00:44:54

GL: Absolutely.

LG: Did you expect that to happen when you were like a student nurse? Because it just sounds so interesting that you were able to really kind of create some new 00:45:00cool opportunities for yourself.

GL: Yeah. I don't think I saw that. But like, yeah, I don't know what to blame all that on other than maybe ignorance. The less we know, the more we think we can accomplish. So I take on a lot of things that are completely beyond my skill set, because I have no idea how difficult they actually turn out to be. There's a word for that, and I don't remember what it is. Like Trump, I think I know it all. So I do get my feet into a lot of different things. But it was a good way to run a career. I mean, northern Wisconsin hospitals are small, and there's plenty of opportunity for someone who's willing to take on lots of roles and do the work and be obsessive about things. And I don't know if that's learned in 00:46:00Madison General. You wouldn't think so, because you'd think the world of hospital nursing is much more restricted to a particular skill set and a particular work environment. But Marge and I certainly stepped around. I mean, she did dialysis and intensive care and coronary care. And home care, and hospice. So she was certainly had a varied career.

But then I look back at someone like Monica Liska, you know. Goes up to Hillsdale Hospital and delivers babies and runs the monitor and runs a ventilator and does all those wonderful things without batting an eye. She can do it. Strong sense of capability. But that's got to be true, probably, of any education system, not something that was just directed toward the hospital nurses. At least I wouldn't think so.

LG: And so if anything, what advice would you give nursing students who are 00:47:00graduating today? Like is there anything that you would want them to know about your experience?

00:47:12

GL: Well, I think, you know, I went into it because I really wanted to help people. And have a career that you could be proud of. I don't think there's any pride in just going off to the office and bringing home a paycheck and raising a family and that's all there is to it. What I'm proud of and what I think gave me job satisfaction was being engaged in people's difficult moments. Now I chose emergency department. I loved it. I loved emergency every minute I worked, because you deal with people in great extreme cases and a great deal of anxiety and pain. And then most of the time you can relieve that. You can relieve the anxiety and the pain. And most patients are going to leave much, much better 00:48:00than when they came in. And you serve that. There's a tremendous satisfaction in that.

I ran an ER for a long time. Sometimes at least 50 people reporting to me. And I insisted that they be good to people and that they be respectful to people, no matter what the circumstances. And I know that was right. I know it was right not to impose your beliefs on people, because I saw the effects of what happens when you do that.

And I'll tell you a story I told nurses. I had a young woman come in the door carrying a baby in her arms. The kid was about a year and a half old, and lifeless. And we resuscitated that child. We were successful. The child was not hardly breathing when she came in. I grabbed this baby at the door, ran him into a room, and we got fluids into this baby and were successful resuscitation.

So then we're talking to her. What happened? Why, how did this happen? Well, it's a hot day in August. She's got an apartment in downtown Rice Lake. And the baby had been sick two days earlier. She'd come to our ER. And the doctors and nurses just treated her badly. Just told her that she should do this and do that and don't bother them, and this is an emergency department and you can't be coming in here with every little this or that. And just made her feel unwelcome.

And so when this baby got more and more lifeless, sicker and sicker, she was afraid to come in. And fortunately, she finally did. She finally did come in. But if she'd have waited another hour, her baby would have been dead.

And my lesson to my crew was you know, you fill a need for these people that is more than just respond to some disease. You are the mother for this girl who's 00:50:00all alone in an un-air conditioned apartment. You are mother and family to that person. That's your role in society. These are your people. And you've got to be there in all aspects for them. And that's the crime, making her feel that it's not right to come to the emergency department with a stupid complaint. There is no stupid questions. These are your people. And when I gave up the ER, my advice to the woman who took over for me is that when it comes to the poor, you're the only one. You're the only one who will speak to them. So you've got to be there.

I started a program at Lakeview called the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner Program. Another nurse and I put this thing together. And we were unique in northern Wisconsin for sexual assault nurse examiner. Because no one wants to take on this difficult stuff. No one wants to be there for people. It's just a 00:51:00big bother. And I don't think that's right. I don't think you can leave a career like mine years later and say, I never did anything except take home a paycheck. I think that's just--what's that worth?

So we did the sexual assault nurse examiner. It was very successful. We trained eight nurses here. And from that time forward, the district attorney here never took a sexual assault case to trial that she didn't win. Because we had set down the standards for how you collect the evidence and do all that right. And I was honored when I was leading the ER by the district attorney and the circuit court judge because they had the statewide establishment had nominated me as the nurse of the year or some such for starting that program, because it was wonderfully successful.

They have a similar program in Eau Claire. Madison has one of the most advanced 00:52:00programs. And I remember when that program started, the number of reported sexual assaults on campus went up tenfold. We never had that kind of response up here. But we did right by the women who did report it. And we picked up one extraordinary case of child sexual assault that would have been ignored by the local police if we hadn't stepped in with our evidence and with our insistence that something be done. So we did some good things. And that's what you get from working hard and taking chances.

LG: So is there anything else that you'd like to include about your experience with Madison General before we conclude this interview?

GL: Just to wrap it all up, I think I've probably given you a tone that I appreciated the school and I appreciated the people I went to school with. It 00:53:00certainly gave me a solid enough foundation that there was no questions about pursuing a career wherever I wanted it to go, or wherever my wife wanted it to go. And it certainly delivered on preparing us for a world that certainly needed the workers and that needed skilled people.

When we graduated, I had applied at the VA in Madison at University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the neurology department. And at Madison General. And I think Marge, my wife was accepted immediately wherever she applied. I was not accepted at any of those places. So I thought oh, boy, I better start looking around. So I applied at Marshfield and immediately got a job Marshfield. Took that job. And then a week later, got a letter from every one of these other places that they would accept me as a new employee. So it had just taken some 00:54:00time. So we had moved into a job market that was very, very strong. It's still strong today. So that was good for us. And Madison General certainly prepared us for that.

54:23

[End Interview.]