by Clinton Colmenares
Carol Jones, R.N., in the firm but polite manner perfected by nurses, declines
an in-jest invitation for an on-camera moment by a TV reporter visiting her
OR.
“No,”she says flatly, with a discounting glance and an ironic smile.
Then she adds, “I let my daughter handle the interviews,” and a
slight blush becomes a beaming hue, her chin, upwardly thrust, expressing
maternal pride.
While Carol ran from the sight of a camera, about 15 hours earlier her daughter,
Jeanne Yeatman, LifeFlight nurse and the newly appointed manager of the air
transport program at Vanderbilt, was thrust in front of a phalanx of them,
describing via TV to tens of thousands of people the chilling experience of
flying a critically, and ultimately fatally, burned man from a factory explosion
in Corbin, Ky. She handled them as deftly as her mother circulated sterile
equipment for a vascular case.
Jeanne’s outgoingness and Carol’s initial quietness are different
threads, but they’re woven through striking similar patterns, cut from
the same basic cloth. They went through nursing school together, but their
paths to and through education were markedly different.
Carol remembers thinking, “My nest was going to be empty,” she says.
Her gig as a full-time mother, Girl Scout leader and community volunteer ended
when Jeanne and her younger sister were nearing high school graduation. “I
saw the writing on the wall. What was I going to do with my life?” Nursing,
it seemed, offered a lifelong profession.
Jeanne’s warp and woof were wound early. At 6, she watched in amazement
as a helicopter landed in her Baltimore neighborhood and rushed another little
girl her age to the city’s shock trauma center after she accidentally
burned herself with boiling water; during an ER visit at age 10, she peeked
under the curtain to watch blood from a gunshot victim pool on the floor.
Carol, however, had to overcome a snag: fright of blood. That time in the
ER, as Jeanne craned her neck to absorb more gore, Carol fainted in a doctor’s
arms.
“It’s true,” admits Carol, who now scrubs in on vascular and
heart cases.
Making a scary situation better
Coincidentally, it was Jeanne’s first experience at Vanderbilt that
created a notion of a medical career in both her and her mother.
When Jeanne was about 14, Carol suspected her daughter had scoliosis after
reading a magazine article, and she brought her to Vanderbilt’s Dr. Neil
Green for corrective surgery.
That back-straightening experience —weeks as an inpatient recovering
from spinal fusion and six months in a body cast — gave Jeanne and Carol
an insider’s glance at medicine.
“Dr. Green was such a nice man, and still is,” Jeanne says. He would
sit on her bed to talk with her, she says, and made every attempt to add humanity
to medicine. A nurse went to extra lengths to make Jeanne comfortable for
surgery. “They made really small things very important in a scary situation,”
Carol says.
So, when Carol was 42 and looking for a job outside the home, and Jeanne was
19 and searching for her first career, they enrolled in Columbia State’s
RN program. “Nobody knew” they were related, Jeanne says. “We
didn’t make a big deal out of it.”
They rode to school together, studied together, leaned on each other a time
or two. But, Jeanne says, “we were polar opposites. I was young, living
on my own and going to school when having a social life was everyone’s
priority.” Jeanne worked part-time jobs; Carol was still a mom. Jeanne
had been a student for 18 years; Carol was learning how to be one.
“I was an older student and I wanted to do very well,” Carol says.
Lessons required more concentration. “Jeanne was so smart,” she
says. But tests came easier to Carol, because the questions were partly based
on life experiences.
In 1989, the two were externs at Vanderbilt, Carol on 7 South and Jeanne,
naturally, in the emergency department. After graduation in 1990 they were
both quickly hired, their new jobs shuttling their respective yarns back and
forth, their designs established, the fabric taking shape.
Carol’s fear of blood overcome, she found a home as a scrub nurse. Since
she started here she’s worked in a small handful of very similar rooms,
her environment carefully controlled, comparatively predictable, straightforward.
After several years in the emergency department, Jeanne ascended into LifeFlight.
She’s flown across middle Tennessee and beyond, her chaotic whirlwind
emergent and vastly varied.
Committed to the ideology
Green, professor of Orthopaedics and vice chair of the department, recalls
the two’s similarities, yet different tacks, when he first encountered
them.
“You don’t remember every patient,” he says. “But I remember
Jeanne. She was very bright, and always had a smile on her face. She dealt
with it (surgery and the cast) better than most kids, probably because of
her positive attitude.”
Green says he can’t remember Carol not being a nurse. Maybe she had already
committed to that ideology. He does remember their different natures. “Jeanne
is very vivacious. Carol is quiet ... but she’s strong enough to express
herself very well.”
A resemblant strength carries Jeanne through a physically demanding job. But
it runs an even deeper course.
“I found out as much as I could about the problem and then go right to
the best source for a solution,” Carol says of how she handled Jeanne’s
scoliosis, a condition other doctors hadn’t treated as seriously or competently
as Green.
That thread is consistent in Jeanne. “I don’t take ‘no’
for an answer when I know ‘yes’ is the right answer,” she says.
“I learned that from Mom. She doesn’t B.S. when it’s very important.”
That Carol got through nursing school, and started a nursing career, in her
40s, was inspiring, Jeanne says. But she wouldn’t call it a great leap.
“My grandparents were very hard-working people. My mom’s a product
of her environment.
In fact, while in Baltimore, Carol worked for the National Security Agency.
She quickly rose in seniority as a personnel administrator with a top-secret
clearance and access to encrypted messages. She interviewed, screened and
hired administrators to work with undercover agents in Okinawa.
“Maybe that’s why she’s so tough,” says Dr. Karla Christian,
associate professor of Surgery in Cardio-Thoracic Surgery.
In the OR, Carol says, “I love the whole technical aspect of what I do,
knowing the different instruments for various procedures and anticipating
what the surgeons need.”
“She’s a terrific nurse, with a lot of attention to detail, very
professional and compassionate,” Christian says. “She’s a good
teacher, patient with me, and lots of fun, when the situation allows. And
she’s always willing to go the extra mile when I need her.”
Although she’s the manager, Jeanne still flies, and still gets an adrenaline
rush from intubating a patient, flying at 200 mph 1,000 feet off the ground,
or reviving coding patients in the elevator on the 14-story trip from the
helipad to the ED.
“We’re introduced into patients’ lives during their very worst
moments,” she says, and there’s a reflection to her surgery as a
teenager and an underscore of appreciation for her care then. “It either
drains you, or it builds you up. I really feel like my heart has grown.”
Up close, similarities are harder to observe than distinct differences, especially
when the patterns are being observed by family, amid family ties. But commonalities,
and genes, are what bind us together.
At work at Vanderbilt, the most apparent thread in Jeanne’s and Carol’s
lives is the one that strives to succeed. Following her mother’s reach
for more education, Jeanne has earned three master’s degrees, including,
in April, an MBA from Trevecca University.
But, she adds, letting a little thread unspool, pointing to Carol, “I’ll
be her age before I go back to school.” And the weaves begins to look
even more alike.