Lori A. Smith is like a prayer answered from above, spending the last 34 years descending in her FlightCare helicopter onto some of the most critical emergency response scenes across mid-Michigan.
Smith, the longest-serving flight nurse among Michigan’s seven air medical transport programs, recently retired, ending a professional experience that launched when George H.W. Bush was still president.
Daily Nurse proudly honors Smith as our Nurse of the Week, celebrating her 34-year sky-bound career.
The propellers on Smith’s career began spinning in 1986 on a turnpike in Cleveland. The then-25-year-old Hurley Medical Center nursing school graduate was driving home when traffic stopped because of a vehicle crash.
“Then a helicopter landed right in front of me, right at the scene,” says Smith, who watched emergency responders tend to the crash victims. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, what is that?’ I was fascinated.”
One year later, the FlightCare program was founded at Ascension St. Mary’s Hospital. She joined the unit in 1989, beginning her long career.
Smith received certification as a flight paramedic and a flight nurse, which involved additional training in aviation medicine.
As a member of FlightCare, Smith worked the 7 a.m.-to-7 p.m. shift, stationed in the unit’s headquarters on the northwest corner of Ascension St. Mary’s hospital campus in downtown Saginaw. There, the 15-member team — divided between two shifts — remains stationed in an office that doubles as a house while waiting between emergency calls. A hangar stands a few feet away, housing the EC-135 model helicopter that mid-Michigan residents sometimes watch and hear racing across the sky, day and night, at heights reaching 2,000 feet.
Smith has lost count of how many emergency calls she’s engaged as a member of FlightCare. Since its founding three years before Smith’s arrival, the unit has transported 12,000 patients. Smith estimated she responds to about three emergency calls each shift.
Most of those trips happen within mid-Michigan borders. However, Smith and her FlightCare colleagues sometimes pick up or drop off individuals that need quick transportation to or from medical facilities offering specialized emergency care.
The closer-to-home emergency calls often send the FlightCare craft to scenes on highways and roads during situations where individuals in need of critical care are positioned dangerously far from the medical care that could save their lives.
Some of those people forge lifelong relationships with Smith. For example, she regularly receives phone calls from patients she helped rescue during FlightCare missions.
“You don’t walk away from as many critical patients as I have without it touching your heart,” she says.
Her nursing work in the FlightCare helicopter happens in close quarters. There’s not much room to move in the EC-135. With a pilot in the cockpit, Smith and one of her colleagues have two seats in the fuselage. There’s barely enough space to fit a stretcher and the patient who rests on it. The remaining room in the aircraft is barely big enough to store the medical equipment necessary to keep that patient alive.
“Oh, we’re right on top of (the patients) when we’re in there,” Smith says, “but we need to be.”
Smith called her FlightCare colleagues “a family.”
“The people I work with kept me here for as long as I’ve been here,” she says. “It’s been a great, great run. I always say, ‘I did a couple of things right in this life.’ My career choice is one of those things.”
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