STOCKHOLM, Maine — When Travis Bouchard was 15 years old, he dissected a moose heart on his mother’s kitchen table.
Eleven years later, Bouchard, now a student in his third year in University of New England’s osteopathic medicine program, has moved on to human anatomy but credits those early dissections and conversations with two older generations of Bouchard health care workers with sparking his passion for medicine.
He is following in the footsteps of his grandmother and family nurse practitioner Millie Forbes, his mother and certified nurse midwife, Bonnie Bouchard, and his aunt and registered nurse Lynn Turnbull, all of Stockholm.
“Having them all as family members really gave me exposure to the field of medicine,” Travis Bouchard said by phone during a break in his course work last week.
Bouchard’s journey into the health care field was set decades ago, when Forbes was working as a nurse in what was then Cary Memorial Hospital in Caribou.
“You wake up one morning, and you are sitting at a desk, and you realize you are a nursing director in administration,” Forbes, 80, said last week as she and her daughters sat at her kitchen table. “You realize you don’t enjoy it [because] you want to be out with the patients but are being discouraged from doing that.”
That was in 1976, and with the full support of her family, Forbes decided she would go back to school to obtain her family nurse practitioner licence from the University of Southern Maine.
Those were very different times, Forbes recalled, and when she returned to northern Maine in 1978 with her family nurse practitioner license in hand — the first one in Aroostook County — she said she was met with some resistance.
“People did not know what [a family nurse practitioner] was,” she said. “I could write prescriptions, examine and treat patients, [and] that was a whole new thing having a nurse able to do that, [and] I got a lot of ‘Who are you?’ ‘What are you?’ and ‘What are you going to do?’”
But Forbes was no quitter and eventually overcame gender and professional bias to earn a position at the Veterans Administration clinic in Caribou and as head of the health clinics at University of Maine at Presque Isle and what was then Northern Maine Vocational Technical Institute.
Caring, dedicated, bright and driven. That was the example Forbes set.
“At its most basic level, I wanted to be in a field that provides service to another human being,” Bouchard said.
“We all had a lot of support from our parents really early on,” Bonnie Bouchard said. “I remember on my ninth birthday all I wanted was to go to work with my mom for the day.”
Turnbull recalled being dressed up as a nurse by her mom when she was 5 or 6 years old.
“We had dolls and stuffed animals as girls,” Turnbull said. “We were always putting bandages on them and giving them shots.”
Turnbull said she can’t remember a time she did not want to be a nurse.
It took a bit longer for Bouchard to jump on board.
“I remember as a girl saying I definitely was not going into the medical field,” she said. “But one day when I was 16, I woke up and said, ‘I’m going to be a nurse.’”
The sisters said they absorbed almost through osmosis much of what their mother did in nursing.
“Like how to make beds with proper hospital corners,” they both said in unison.
Much has changed in the profession since Forbes graduated from nursing school in the early 1950s.
“Back then, nursing was how you think of nurses,” she said. “You bathed patients, you made beds, and there was no such thing as [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] at all.”
In fact, Forbes remembers when CPR training came to northern Maine and being a big part of it.
“Yeah, Annie lived at our house,” Bouchard said with a laugh, referring to the life-size medical doll commonly called “Annie” used in CPR training.
In Forbes’ early years of nursing, she said, there was a bit of a disconnect between doctors, nurses, patients and their family members. That was something she saw firsthand when her daughter Lynn was born.
“I was not aware of much for about six hours after she was born,” Forbes said. “But when I began to rally, I told the nurse I did not remember seeing [my husband], and it turned out they had forgotten to tell him she’d been born.”
That’s how things were back then, Forbes said. Husbands and new fathers-to-be were forced to wait out the birth of children pacing back and forth in waiting rooms far from the delivery room.
“I vowed that would stop,” Forbes said. “I wanted husbands not only allowed in during labor, but encouraged to be there.”
So she started “family-centered maternity care” and said she was soon the “laughingstock” of many of her medical colleagues.
“They thought I was out of my mind suggesting men be in the delivery room,” Forbes said.
Nurses were not considered part of the health care team, Turnbull recalls.
“When I was in my [nursing] baccalaureate program, it was a time of change,” she said. “We were starting to exert ourselves as part of that team, [and] today we see a team approach, and that is a wonderful difference.”
Collaboration among doctors and nurses had to evolve over time, Bouchard said.
“I’ve already told Travis to listen to the nurses and treat them with respect,” she said. “They are the ones who are with patients 24/7.”
All three women are confident Travis Bouchard has made the right career choice.
“He’s always been very sensitive and kind,” Bonnie Bouchard said. “And I remember when he dissected that moose heart on my kitchen table — he put it on a cookie sheet, and we talked about all the different parts of the heart.”
That exchange of information continues.
“When I was studying reproduction and the physiology on how the body works during pregnancy my mom would put things into context of the real world,” Travis Bouchard said. “I’ve seen the sacrifices they make on a daily basis to meet the needs of their patients, [and] now I’m living it and going through it myself.”
One thing that is never far from Bouchard’s mind is what his grandmother went through to clear a path for the women health care professionals who came behind her.
“I am really proud of my grandmother,” he said. “At the time what she was doing was controversial, and she was really brave, and it took a lot of courage.”
For their part, she, his mom and aunt could not be prouder of Bouchard.
In fact, when he first left for medical school at UNE, Forbes sent him off with her old, black medical bag.
“The students keep asking him if he got it on eBay,” she said with a laugh. “But he just tells them, ‘No, this was my grandma’s.”
