The Healing Touch

“I’d never even heard of it,” McDermott said of the Manhattan hospital. “But I started work there the following Monday.”
She retired last week at age 62.
“It’s time,” said McDermott, who has six grown children and five granddaughters.
“I’ll miss her tremendously,” said Dr. Bruce Charles Zablow, attending neurosurgeon at St. Vincent’s.
Zablow is one of a handful of New York physicians who treats brain aneurysms using a revolutionary, minimally invasive procedure that is fast becoming the norm for the condition. McDermott worked closely with him for 18 years, as the most important person on the nursing side of the staff.
“We had a great relationship,” she said.
Said Zablow: “She’s the complete package, what everybody hopes to see in a hospital when they get sick — somebody they can instantly establish a rapport with. She has a tremendous ability to make people feel comfortable, aside from knowing a whole hell of a lot.”
Over the years, McDermott established expertise in every aspect of nursing, Zablow said, before taking charge of the embolization laboratory. She was responsible not only for the lab’s administration but also had to stay on top of the technology, too.
“And she [kept] everybody going in the same direction, in addition to all of the nursing and patient care,” he said.
It’s the end of an era, more generally, Zablow said.
“Those terrific Irish nurses who trained for generations — there aren’t many of them around any more,” he said.
While talented women are still following vocations in traditional careers like nursing and teachers, many career opportunities have opened in other fields.
“I’m sure that today somebody like Kathy, with her intellect and drive, would be a physician,” the neurosurgeon said.
Katherine Gleeson, who is known as Kathy among her hospital colleagues and Kate by everyone else, was one of seven children born to a family in Smithfield, near Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. After leaving school, she trained in nursing at the Meath Hospital in Dublin. “A crowd of us went to Scotland to do a course in midwifery,” she said.
From there, some went on to work for a year in New Rochelle, N.Y.
Then one night at a party in New Rochelle, she met Gerry McDermott, a Port Authority worker who had left Ballygalda, near Athleague in County Roscommon in 1962.
“He decided for me,” she said of the extension of her stay in America.
McDermott gave birth to five children, including twins, and the couple adopted another son when he was 7.
“I took a couple of years off when they were small,” she recalled.
However, McDermott returned to work full time in 1974, before her family was complete. The couple couldn’t afford not to have two incomes coming in, she said.
Her children, now aged from 34 to 25, are George, a police dispatcher in New Jersey who’s married with two daughters; Paddy, a representative for a drug company; Katie, who works in the Financial District; Nuala, a veterinary surgeon; Geraldine, a housewife, with three daughters; and Gerry, who works with MTV.
It is by any measure an immigrant success story.
For his part, McDermott’s former colleague Zablow described himself as a second-generation American.
His grandparents came to the U.S. not long after the turn of the century, part of the huge immigrant wave from Eastern Europe.
Zablow was raised in Freeport, L.I., and after graduating high school went off to study in the Midwest.
It was a time of upheaval in the country because of the war in Vietnam.
“Because of the situation with the draft at the time, I enlisted in the navy, largely not to wind up in the army,” he said.
He served for a while on an attack nuclear submarine.
In 1971, he returned to the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, to complete his undergraduate degree.
Because of the uncertainty of the times, he hadn’t mapped out a career; indeed, he didn’t even have a major. However, a professor told him if he took a course in physical chemistry, he’d have enough credits to graduate with a degree in molecular biology.
“That had a nice ring to it,” he said.
He didn’t want to be a scientist, though, and the only other viable career option was in medicine. “I got into it as an accident,” Zablow said. “I didn’t grow up thinking I was going to be a doctor.”
While working as a surgical resident at a Cleveland hospital, a specialty began to take shape.
“I became fascinated with what’s now called imaged-guided minimally-invasive surgery which combines imaging with surgery,” he recalled.
Minimally invasive surgery, because it used imaging guidance, was to become a “boutique area” within radiology, he said.
Then, in the early 1990s, an Italian neurosurgeon, Guido Guglielmi, who was leading a research team at UCLA in California, made a breakthrough.
“He came up with an idea of treating a brain aneurysm through the arteries — putting small plastic catheters all the way up into the brain, depositing little coils inside of brain aneurysms to fix them as opposed to having to open the head, and doing it that way,” Zablow said. “I was in the first crop of 50 of people who were trained to do this stuff.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved the Guglielmi Detachable Coil for use in the 1990s in the U.S.
“The first procedure was done in St. Vincent’s in 1996,” recalled McDermott, who by then was working in the interventional radiology department.
Said Zablow: “It’s highly rewarding; it’s wonderful to see people who come in with essentially a life-threatening illness, [and] being able to fix them and all they get is a band aid.
“A lot of these patients make a terrific recovery. It’s very gratifying to have been a part of that.”
Annually, using the GDC procedure, he treats about 40 patients who have ruptured aneurysms. A further 30 patients with aneurysms that haven’t ruptured have elective surgery.
Zablow, a specialist in endovascular neorosurgery using image-guided procedures, also treats patients with strokes and those with vascular problems related to the spine and spinal cord.
Though he and his wife spend weekends out of the city in their Upper Westchester County home, he works seven days.
Robin Zablow works in the field of litigation, commodities and corporate governance, “trying to police these companies to make sure they’re staying within appropriate bounds,” her husband explained.
She also hosts and produces several television programs in Westchester.
“It’s a 70-90 hour week,” he said about his own job. “I’ve devoted my life to this.
“Kathy was extremely giving of her time and her talent,” he continued. “Even when she wasn’t on call at the weekends, she came in. She understands the importance of this.”
McDermott, though, won’t miss the 5:30 a.m. starts.
“You wouldn’t get home until 6 in the evening and, sometimes, not until 1 a.m.,” she said. “I going to spend time with my family and my granddaughters.”
McDermott and her husband travel to Ireland frequently (they were last in Tipperary for her mother’s funeral a few months ago) and have gone there this week to celebrate their retirement. They have been as far away as Australia — to visit their daughter and son-in-law who lived there for a time — but have not traveled much in the United States. “We’re going to drive cross country later in the year,” she said.
McDermott will also have more time for her passion for collecting, and selling, pre-1900 prints.
“I’ve been dabbling for years,” she said. “But, of course I’ll miss work. I loved been a nurse, even it’s not the same bedside care you gave when patients were in for a week or two.
“I started at St. Vincent’s in 1969 and have been there 31 years straight.”
She plans to keep in contact with close friends. “But I’ll miss the very good acquaintances, the people you run into in the hallway,” she said. “It’s like a family there. It’s bittersweet.”