GLOVERSVILLE - Retired U.S. Army Reserves registered nurse Col. Judy Gisondi spent 33 years in the service before retiring in December 2008.
Having never been called to active duty, Gisondi didn't expect ever to gain veteran status, but in April 2009 she got the surprise of a lifetime when the U.S. Army called her to active duty at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
Now that her active duty is up, Gisondi is fully retired from the service and returned to her job at Nathan Littauer Hospital in the critical care unit.
Gisondi, 62, brought back with her new friendships, and honors like the meritorious service medal. But she also brought back heartbreaking stories of soldiers who sacrificed their limbs and lives in the line of battle in the Middle East.
BAMC is a trauma center spanning seven floors of patients, including the Army Burn Center. Located at Fort Sam Houston, it is part of the U.S. Army Medical Command and contains 450 beds, but can hold 653 beds in the event of a disaster.
Gisondi said the hospital also takes in about half of San Antonio's trauma cases.
Gisondi can tell stories about young soldiers, such as a young woman who lost so much tissue on both of her arms she wasn't a candidate for prosthetics, or a young soldier she met in an elevator who lost both hands.
"That's your mission when you're there," Gisondi said of the Army nurses. "You expect to see them."
In part due to Gisondi's extensive background in education, she was selected by the U.S. Army to be the Clinical Transition program director at BAMC for new nurses entering their careers with the U.S. Army.
Like with all professions, "you think you know until you get there," Gisondi said, explaining part of her job was helping the new recruits decide if they were really on the right path for themselves.
"They had to learn how to integrate and learn military roles. That's new to them," Gisondi said.
At BAMC, Gisondi planned, implemented, managed and evaluated the Army Clinical Nurse Transition Program.
"I really enjoyed training all the nurses and going out and touching other people's lives," Gisondi said. "When you touch one life, you're actually touching many lives."
Gisondi flipped through photos from a luncheon thrown for her by her colleagues at BAMC and talked about the lifelong friends she'd made.
She also talked about the variety of reasons people decide they want to become Army nurses.
"Some enlist for patriotic reasons. Some want to travel and see the world," Gisondi said. Gisondi was inspired to become an Army nurse after the Vietnam War.
Gisondi worked at Nathan Littauer Hospital since 2001 in the Critical Care Unit and before that was director of the Practical Nurse Program at Hamilton-Fulton-Montgomery Board of Cooperative Educational Services.
Gisondi began her career in Illinois and moved to the area in the early 1980s. Since then she attended the periodic required drills, but was never called to active duty aside from once during the Gulf War when she was held in Texas for two weeks but never deployed.
According to the recommendation for her meritorious service medal, Gisondi "mentored and proctored over 150 new Army nurses and was recognized by all for her tremendous ability to share her vast knowledge of advanced nursing care concepts."
Her achievements as stated on the recommendation included ensuring that each officer received a warm and informative welcome from BAMC leadership as well as quickly identifying officers who did not successfully meet program requirements and "addressed remedies for the prospective failures in close collaboration with the deputy commander for nursing."
Gisondi's work crossed service lines also as she assisted the Air Force in the "continued education and orientation of up to 16 of their newly assigned professional nursing staff per year. Benefiting the overall mission for both services," according to the achievements listed on the recommendation.
Gisondi was happy to be home and back at Nathan Littauer, but spoke fondly of the new lifelong friends she made in Texas.
Littauer's Vice President of Nursing Regina Mulligan said the hospital, as required by law, reserved Gisondi's job and filled her position internally with another RN while she was away.
"We're glad to have her back. She's an excellent nurse and she's quite an educator," Mulligan said. "She's always thinking of patient care first.
Amanda Whistle covers Gloversville news. She can be reached at gloversville@leaderherald.com
