April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
DYNAMIC DUO
Nuns radiated good humor alongside technical skills
An exchange between the two is dizzying:
Sister Stephen: "I was going to tell the funny story."
Sister Anthony: "Oh, the green scapular, you mean?"
Sister Stephen: "Yes."
Sister Anthony: "One of the doctors had a green scapular."
Sister Stephen: "He was Jewish, and he had a scapular."
Sister Anthony: "And another one, he had one in his wallet, and it had stuck to a $20 bill...."
Years of service
Recently, the pair retired from a total of nearly 100 years of service at St. Mary's Hospital in Amsterdam, where they worked for four decades in the radiology department and then spent a decade greeting visitors at the front desk.Upon their retirement, they received a lifetime achievement award from the hospital for their work.
"It was humbling," said Sister Anthony. "We didn't expect any fanfare."
Twosome
As the two unpacked boxes at their new home, their order's Provincial House in Latham, they reflected on the past five decades together.They have similar backgrounds. Sister Stephen was raised in Schenectady and worked at General Electric's hospital during World War II; she did a stint of teaching fourth grade, where she declared that "the kids were smarter than I was," before coming to St. Mary's to head the radiology department in 1949.
Sister Anthony came to the Albany Diocese from tiny East Dorset, Vermont. She told The Evangelist she still prays every night for the residents of that town -- "there were probably 178 of us, with the cows."
Sister Anthony noted that she decided to leave East Dorset someday when she was a child and took her first babysitting job there. Her employers paid her a dollar, but her mother made her return it, saying, "We don't take money from friends."
"I knew then I couldn't make a living in East Dorset, because everyone was a friend of my mother's!" the sister said, laughing.
Unique role
Sister Anthony trained as an X-ray technician at Albany Medical Center (then called Albany City Hospital) and hired on at St. Mary's in 1954, where she met Sister Stephen. The pair lived in a house next door to the hospital.At the time, the two were the only Sisters of St. Joseph in the entire country who were X-ray technicians. They found their work fascinating. Sister Anthony described 12-hour shifts in the 1950s, doing chest X-rays on patients before surgery.
She and Sister Stephen started out as the only two technicians in a department that now employs 40 people. They not only took X-rays, but also developed them by hand, dipping them into tanks of chemicals, and typed up the files to go with them.
"When we got an electric typewriter, we thought we were something!" Sister Anthony noted.
Memories
Health care fascinates both of them. Sister Anthony remembered X-raying a man after an accident who had windshield wipers hanging out of his forehead. Both sisters saddened as they recalled dealing with victims of the Thruway bridge collapse in Fonda-Fultonville in the mid-1980s. Farming accidents were also frequent in their somewhat rural area.The sisters enjoyed the authority their religious garb gave them. Sister Anthony joked that other employees often came to her complaining that a particular patient wouldn't turn over, but when she walked into the room and said sweetly, "Dear, can you just turn a little bit?" the patient would move right away.
One tough part of the job was reading X-rays and realizing the prognosis wasn't good. Like all technicians, the sisters weren't allowed to tell patients the results; but as Sister Anthony said, "Sometimes, you knew that in a few minutes, their whole life was going to change."
"It made you feel bad for them," said Sister Stephen.
Other times were more cheerful; the sisters recalled one patient whose X-rays showed shattered legs and hips, but who later walked out of the hospital despite all odds.
Storytime
Sisters Stephen and Anthony believe that wherever they go, they come away with a story to tell. That was certainly true of their move to the front desk at St. Mary's in 1991. There, they met visitors like the little girl who spied Sister Anthony's veil and declared, "I love your hat."Another small boy snuck around in back of the desk to greet the sisters. On his way back from an appointment in the lab upstairs, he offered to show them his bandage. They agreed, and he carefully drew back his sleeve to reveal two Band-Aids.
"Oh, that must have hurt," said Sister Anthony.
"It's a fake," said the boy suddenly. "My brother got the blood work!"
Time to leave
After a decade fielding questions and wheeling patients to various hospital departments, the sisters both discovered they had glaucoma. When Sister Anthony found she had to check more and more often to be sure she'd entered things correctly on her computer, the two decided to retire at the same time. Sister Anthony is 72; Sister Stephen is 79.They said wryly that leaving would have been easier if people had been glad to see them go. Instead, the staff was sad to lose the long-time employees.
"They still invite us to every party they have!" Sister Stephen confessed.
What next?
For now, Sister Anthony joked that she and her friend are trying to draw out their unpacking as long as possible to avoid taking on new jobs for a while. She laughed as she recalled attending a funeral at the Provincial House where she and Sister Stephen ended up sitting in front even though they hardly knew the deceased.Their friend Sister Ann Bryan Smollin, CSJ, of the diocesan Counseling for Laity Office, happened by. "We seem to be the official mourners," they told her.
"Well," she said, "I'm glad you found a niche."
White and black
During their time in the radiology department of St. Mary's Hospital in Amsterdam, Sisters Anthony Marie Leary and Stephen Maria Dixon became experts at handling emergencies. Sister Anthony recalled one time when an X-ray machine broke on a weekend, and the two were forced to try and repair it themselves. Sister Anthony crawled under the machine and, getting covered in grease, managed to put a nut on a broken fan to hold it in place. Noting her floor-length black habit, this Evangelist reporter commented, "It's a good thing you wear black.""We wore white," she deadpanned.
(St. Mary's Hospital in Amsterdam recently honored several employees with healthcare excellence awards. Sister Anthony and Sister Stephen received the Sister Catherine Bernard Cox, CSJ, award for lifetime achievement for their combined 100 years of service. Sister Catherine was a St. Mary's employee who was killed in a traffic accident in 2000.)
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