When longtime Peterborough resident Bonnie Fecowicz started her nursing career 50 years ago — half a century before this May’s National Nurses Month — it was in many ways a very different profession.
“At my nursing school, St. Vincent’s [in Worcester, Mass.], we used to have to kneel down on the ground and they would measure our skirts to make sure they weren’t too short,” Fecowicz said.
Although Fecowicz comes from a family of nurses, she didn’t originally want to go into the field.
“My mother was a nurse, my sisters were nurses, my sister-in-law was a nurse, my two brothers were orderlies — that was all we heard around the dinner table,” Fecowicz said. “Women didn’t have a lot of choices back then. I thought maybe I could teach English, because I loved creative writing, so I went to nursing school somewhat reluctantly.”
Despite her reluctance, Fecowicz learned she not only liked nursing but also thrived in it, despite rigid standards and fierce competition.
“My school, St. Vincent’s, produced incredible nurses; they really weeded people out. Every year, about 10% of the class was eliminated, either academically, because of your attitude, or because of your skill set,” she said.
Student nurses in Fecowicz’s program worked as nursing assistants every weekend throughout their three-year program, learning on the job in addition to academics.
“It was kind of like being on a three-year job interview, because we worked as nursing assistants every weekend. If you performed well, your name would be mentioned. They started to look at us in school and identify what our strengths were,” Fecowicz said.
While most of Fecowicz’s classmates were assigned to specific areas, such as maternal medicine, surgery, or ICU, Fecowicz became a “float nurse,” rotating among every area of the hospital.
“The first 10 years, I thought that was a weakness, because I hadn’t fallen in love with one area. Eventually, I came to realize it was a huge value add, and I finally saw what others had seen in me long before I saw it in myself, which was that I had great adaptability and great flexibility. Most people really preferred being in the same department, having the same co-workers each time, but I could adapt quickly to new situations,” she said.
When Fecowicz and her classmates graduated in 1978, they took care of countless veterans returning from Vietnam.
“There was an edginess to those soldiers that you didn’t see with the World War II veterans,” Fecowicz said. “It was incredible to think that, after they had survived being shot at and almost killed, everything they went through, that they would come home and people would be disrespectful to them, that they would be disrespected the way they were. No one talked about PTSD then. They used to call it ‘shell shock.'”
After Fecowicz married her husband, Rick, the couple lived in different places around the country for his career, and Bonnie continued to work as a float nurse. During the first Bush administration, Fecowicz was working at a large hospital in Portland, Maine.
“When we were in Portland, I had to get security clearance in case President Bush came in, because we were the closest hospital to Kennebunk. I was a float nurse, so I worked the ER,” Fecowicz said.
Fecowicz and her husband worked and lived overseas for several years, and when their children were little, she worked part-time for an insurance company.
“I wanted to be a soccer mom; I wanted to be able to go to their games and be there for them,” she said.
In 1998, Rick Fecowicz, who had been working for LL Bean, took a position at EMS, and the family moved to Peterborough. Fecowicz realized she missed working with patients and returned to clinical nursing at Monadnock Community Hospital.
“I had only worked at large hospitals, and when I started at Monadnock, they told me it was a critical access hospital, and I didn’t know what that was. It’s a Medicare designation for rural hospitals, and it means it could only have 25 beds,” Fecowicz said.
Fecowicz began working at the gerontology psychiatric department at MCH, which cared for elderly people with behavioral health issues. Being with patients again had an indelible effect on Fecowicz, and eventually pivoted the course of her career back toward nursing education.
“I was with a patient in the gero-psych ward, and I put her blanket in the dryer to warm it up for her, because the air conditioning was really chilly. And when I put the warm blanket on her, she took my hand, and she kissed it. This patient was non-verbal, and after she did that, I literally cried for 45 minutes,” Fecowicz said.
Fecowicz says nursing “is not like you see it on TV.”
“It’s not like that, with all the car crashes and emergencies. The truth is, you get more out of nursing than you give. To me, being with a patient and family when they are dying — that is the most intimate, graceful moment in the world. If you can support that family and that patient in that most private of times — and it won’t happen every shift, it won’t happen with every patient, but if it happens even once a year, it keeps you passionate for this profession,” Fecowicz said. “No one ever told me you’ll actually get more out of nursing than you give.”
Fecowicz says working at MCH “made her a better nurse,” and gave her a broader understanding of how an entire hospital operates due to the smaller scale.
“I thought I was a good nurse when I got to Monadnock, but working there made me a great nurse, because the patients are never strangers. When I worked at the big hospitals in Boston, the patients were strangers — you knew you were never going to see them again. But here, every patient could be your kids’ soccer coach, it could be your co-workers’ grandparents. At a smaller hospital, you don’t have a lot of additional resources, so my clinical ability grew as well. It’s easy to be great when you’re at Mass General and you’re surrounded by the best, but working in a small hospital, that’s where you are really pushed, and where you really grow.”
While she was at MCH, Fecowicz saw many of her young staff continue their nursing education at Southern New Hampshire University, and she finally decided, with the encouragement of her supervisors, to go back and get an advanced degree herself.
“I told my boss, my degrees were practically carved in stone by Moses,” Fecowicz joked.
She earned a bachelor’s degree at SNHU, followed by a master’s, and is now, at nearly 70 years old, Fecowicz is working on a doctorate of nursing practice.
“I still see the value of education. Healthcare moves very quickly; what you know today could be very different in two years as far as how your practice. Staying in tune with best practices means you can never stop your education,” Fecowicz said.
With her new advanced degrees, Fecowicz left Monadnock to serve as a chief nursing officer at Tewksbury Hospital, which provides care for adults with medical and behavioral health issues, right at the onset of COVID.
“They had lost some patients to COVID, and my assignment, when I got there, was do everything possible to not allow another patient to die from COVID, and I did that,” she said.
Fecowicz “needed a break” after the intense COVID years, as well as from the 90-minute commute to Tewksbury. She considered other CNO jobs in New Hampshire, but then a friend told her about a new nursing school, Nightingale, based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
“My friend was working at this school, and she told me how different they were in their approach, but I didn’t believe it,” she said. “What I had seen as a nurse leader for the past 10 to 15 years was that the nurses being produced in the programs now were being well-prepared to take the NCLEX, but they were not coming out with the real-life skills like we got when I was in nursing school. The schools are producing for the exam, but the exam is not an indicator of whether you were going to be an effective nurse; it is not teaching the bedside skills. Nurses today are not being prepared the way I was, working at the hospital every weekend. When I graduated from nursing school, on my very first shift, I was in charge of a whole unit at night, and I was responsible for 72 patients. And I was ready. That’s how prepared we were.
Fecowicz sees two elements that are essential to a person’s ability to become an effective nurse.
“Over the years, I probably interviewed 1,000 people for nursing positions, and I asked them two questions. One, show me how you are a lifelong learner, and two, show me how you are a compassionate person. Those are the two skills I could not teach anybody. I could teach all the clinical skills, but if you can demonstrate lifelong learning and compassion, I believe you could make an excellent nurse. and we would fill in the gaps along the way,” Fecowicz said.
Today, Fecowicz is vice president of Nightingale Solutions at Nightingale Education Group, a nursing school based in Salt Lake City.
“I felt that I had not given enough back to the profession, and I felt I needed to give back to those student nurses more. I wanted to be a conduit from nurse leaders in the hospital, or in places like Rivermead, and other nursing facilities. I wanted to be the conduit to communicate with a nursing school. So I took the remote position from Salt Lake City,” Fecowicz said.
In her new role, Fecowicz travels the country to visit nursing programs and has embraced technology, including using virtual reality to simulate clinical situations. She is engaged in research with the American Organization of Nurse Leaders, which studies nursing education.
“I love virtual reality. I tell my colleagues, tell me if I start acting like the old lady, but they say it’s the opposite, that I am way out ahead,” she said.
Fecowicz says it saddens her to see the high burnout rate in nurses today, and cites the increasing litigation against medical practitioners.
“It is much harder to practice now than it was. Nurses have a lot more tasks assigned to them now, which they have to document, all because of litigation. When I was managing, I had 90 direct reports, and that is unfair. It doesn’t work. Looking at whether people succeed, there can be a direct correlation between how well they succeed in the first few months and who their manager is,” she said. “I don’t teach any nurses myself, but I am trying to support them by helping them be more effective .”
Fecowicz says she has no intention of slowing down anytime soon.
“My husband would love me to retire, but I’m not ready to stop,” she said. “I love making a difference.”