It wasn't just any magazine that caught Anne Hutchinson's attention in 1980: It was a copy of Yale Nurse that belonged to her mother, Elizabeth "Betty" Hutchinson '45. In her personal life, Anne Hutchinson '84 had been impressed with the nurse-midwife who taught her childbirth classes and then really appreciated the pediatric nurse practitioner who cared for her daughter, Jenefer, as a baby and toddler. So when Hutchinson came home for a visit, she read Yale Nurse, which featured the Pediatric Nurse Practitioner (PNP) program, and she was sold. This from a woman who was determined never to become a nurse.

Hutchinson graduated from Connecticut College and spent three years with the Peace Corps in Ghana, an experience that spawned her interest in international health. After earning a master's degree in oceanography from Oregon State University, Hutchinson spent a third of her time on a ship, a third with a microscope, and a third on a computer; she enjoyed the research science but missed working with people.

Suddenly inspired by the Yale Nurse article on PNPs, Hutchinson applied to YSN, was accepted, and began her Yale studies with the intent of becoming a nurse-midwife. Donna Diers '64, then Dean of the School, encouraged her to follow in the footsteps of another real-life Anne Hutchinson, this one from the 1600s. The older Hutchinson was one of the earliest feminists, who also attended many births. But present-day Hutchinson was drawn more to pediatrics. Her thesis was based on a summer in Tanzania, where she studied development in babies who lived in orphanages. Children under the age of two were left isolated in cribs every day, all day, and the effects on their development were, of course, enormous and devastating.

After beginning a career as a PNP in two private practices in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Hutchinson still wanted to study international health. After her three children went off to college, she graduated from Tulane University in 2003 with her third master's degree, this time in public health. She studied tropical medicine, economies of third-world nations, and business management. All of her classmates were from or had worked in developing countries. After her graduation, Hutchinson took a three-month position in Ethiopia as a surveillance officer for a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) polio project in partnership with the World Health Organization. She spent her winters teaching in a national park in Suriname, where she reached her destination by tiny plane or a dugout canoe.

But when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, Hutchinson brought her skills as a nurse and her experiences in public health back home to America. Because of other commitments, including another trip to Suriname, she didn't make it to New Orleans until the week of Mardi Gras in February of 2006. For two weeks, Hutchinson witnessed and worked among the devastation caused by Katrina. This was not the place she knew while studying at Tulane; it was, however, the scene predicted in her disaster management class for the flooding in New Orleans in the presence of a Category 5 hurricane. Though Katrina was "downgraded" to a Category 3 at landfall, the predictions for casualties and infrastructure destruction were dead on. Describing New Orleans even in the best of times as "third-world America," Hutchinson says that the hurricane caused even greater suffering because there was no plan in place to evacuate the 40% of the population who did not have private transportation. Also, there was no shelter equipped to provide services in the event of flooding, and in addition, many buildings were in poor condition, full of dry rot and termites, making it easy for the water to destroy them.

That February, in her role as a volunteer nurse with the U.S. Public Health Service, Hutchinson worked in Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans with people whose lives remained totally interrupted six months after the storm. There was still no access to regular health care. Months without even basic medications, unending stress, and processed foods caused skyrocketing blood pressures among survivors. All referral services, from eyeglasses to psychiatric care, were difficult to come by, and Hutchinson spent many phone hours trying to arrange appropriate care. And everyone needed someone to listen to their stories.

Her final weekend there was spent caring for a fellow volunteer nurse who developed a lung empyema with a very high fever. The ill nurse and Hutchinson had a chance to experience firsthand the shortage of hospital beds when they went to the emergency "room" at the New Orleans Convention Center, where military-style tents had been erected for outpatient emergency services. The colleague was transferred to the just-opened emergency department (ED) at Tulane University Hospital. The ED was overflowing as there were no inpatient beds available. Because of the severe shortage of nurses, Hutchinson had to provide the nursing care for her friend. People were dying on either side of her. After thoracentesis and with intervention by her U.S. senators, the nurse was flown by air ambulance back to her home hospital in Oregon, where she made a complete recovery.

Realizing that the greatest need was housing (nurses could not staff hospitals if they had nowhere to live), Hutchinson learned that her church's national organization was working on repairing homes. Two weeks later she was back in New Orleans with the first of five volunteer building teams that she had organized. One of those volunteers was another Yale Nurse, Sylvia Metzler '84, a family nurse practitioner who was Hutchinson's housemate at Yale.

While volunteering in New Orleans, when they are not building houses, the volunteers are talking to the grateful owners. Hutchinson says that the woman whose home they are currently rebuilding has become much healthier, not by just losing some weight and getting her diabetes under control, but by having people listen to her. "At YSN, I learned how to ask questions, listen, and be flexible," says Hutchinson.

When Hutchinson is not working as a PNP or traveling to Louisiana, she continues to wear her community health hat by organizing a soup kitchen in her hometown. With her husband, Eugene Kalish (Yale Drama MFA '73, DFA '76), and nephew, Bryan, a high school junior, she makes her home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Hutchinson's family of nurses has come full circle, too. Her daughter Jenefer has also chosen to enter the nursing profession, following the tradition of her mother and grandmother.

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