The caring career: Local nurse retires after 46 years

LACONIA — Nursing has been Karin Salome’s life work, such that even though she has officially retired after more than four decades in the career, she is continuing to help the state navigate its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Salome grew up in a small town in Massachusetts. She said nursing was “always something I was called to do. I was always the person everyone turned to to be doctored or nursed among friends, even in play.” Even when playing “Army” with her male cousins, Salome would be at the ready to help patch up the grievously injured so that they could return to the fray.

After high school, Salome attended a hospital-run nursing school in Framingham, graduating in 1974. That same year, she married Robert, whose work required them to relocate to Vermont. She was able to get work at the Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital in St. Johnsbury.

Early in her career, Salome learned some things about nursing that remain true to today: nursing opens a door to a myriad of career paths, and skilled nurses can write their own ticket.

The Salomes were in Vermont for just over a year when they, as well as another young couple they had befriended, decided they should see more of the world before they – as she put it – “settled down.” That’s why, in 1975, they moved to Santa Monica, California, where Karin was hired to work at a large medical center.

“I had some wonderful experiences,” Salome said. She had operating room experience in NVRH, which she used in Santa Monica to get in on some cutting-edge surgeries: plastic surgery, joint replacement, even open-heart surgery.

“The first time I was involved in that, I was in awe at watching the heart beat in front of you, and the lungs expanding. I will remember that to this day,” she said.

Salome has sat with patients as they exhaled their last breath, and, as part of a Caesarian surgical team, has heard babies give their first cry. For a nurse, each of those moments is its own privilege, she said.

By 1977, she and Robert decided they were ready to return to New England. They picked Laconia because it was near their parents – but not too near – and it offered the same kind of rural landscape they had grown up with.

At Lakes Region General Hospital, Salome found an institution that she said she came to love, especially in 2018 after their granddaughter was born so premature that she weighed just 23 ounces. That day, the LRGH maternity ward was staffed with heroes who kept the baby alive while the helicopter could be summoned to whisk her to the neonatal intensive care unit at Dartmouth-Hitchcock. Their granddaughter is now a thriving little girl.

There isn’t a maternity ward at LRGH any more – one of the cuts to services that were deemed necessary to staunch the financial losses the nonprofit LRGHealthcare organization has endured for years. Salome said she welcomes recent news that reports a likely takeover of the organization by Concord Hospital, once viewed as a competitor to Lakes Region.

About the elimination of birthing services, Salome said: “Intellectually I understand the decision that was made, but I grieve it to this day. The work they did was really amazing there. And I am so grateful that there appears to be this relationship that’s developing with Concord Hospital, so our hospital can remain alive and serving our community.”

For their part, the Salomes also sought to serve their community, especially when it came to youth sports. Robert, who was a sought-after optician prior to his retirement, had the thick skin necessary to officiate local youth sports. Karin, when one of her sons was playing baseball, made her own mark in Laconia Little League history by being the first female coach of a “major” level team.

Salome’s service has extended beyond Laconia. Since 1993, she has worked for the state’s Bureau of Infectious Disease as a public health nurse. She retired from that role three years ago to help care for her granddaughter, but was pulled back in about this time last year, recruited to join the state’s management of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the past year, Salome has performed individual case investigations, been involved in producing guidance for schools and congregate living settings, and currently answers the phone when providers or members of the public have a clinical question that the 2-1-1 operator can’t answer.

Asked about the public’s response to guidance, Salome said, “For the most part, I think people are cooperative and want to do the right thing, and follow the guidance and recommendations of public health experts, but there’s always a few that have their own philosophies.”

After all the work she is seeing performed to fight the virus, she said it can be “very, very, very frustrating” to encounter people who flaunt control measures or discount the risks of the disease, which has killed more than 400,000 Americans.

“So many people say it is just like the flu. But if you look at the statistics for the flu, in the entire United States in a bad year, we will have 35,000 to 40,000 deaths in an entire year, and now compare that to COVID. There’s no comparison,” she said.

To people considering a career in nursing, Salome said, “If they have any kind of leaning toward any kind of helping profession, nursing is definitely one to consider because of all the possibilities and paths you can take.” She recommended getting a bachelor’s degree as a foundation, and from there a wide selection of pathways open up: correctional nursing, long-term care, nurse practitioner, hospice care. “And, they can go pretty much anywhere in the United States.”

Much has changed since she graduated from nursing school in 1974. Electronic records and other technological advances, leaps in medical research, and, something she particularly welcomed, the inclusion of males into the profession.

“There’s lots and lots of things that have changed about nursing, but what hasn’t changed is the essence of nursing: caring for someone in their time of need,” Salome said. “That part of nursing hasn’t changed.”