When Heidi Close, a registered nurse, left her family and her job to help set up a military hospital for American soldiers wounded in the Gulf war, her main fear was that she would be forgotten.
She found it was more difficult to come home than it was to leave.
Close, now director of maternity services for the obstetrics and gynecology unit at Rush North Shore Medical Center in Skokie, spent two months at the Torrejon Air Base in Spain, preparing to treat thousands of American soldiers expected to be wounded in the ground phase of the war.
A member of the medical unit of the Air Force Reserves, Close was called up on a Friday and left the next Monday, two weeks after her husband, a navigator in the Illinois National Guard, had been deployed to Saudi Arabia. She left their three children, who ranged in age from 7 and 13, with her parents.
Close, along with Dr. Albert Swerdlow, a surgeon at Rush who also was at Torrejon Air Base, will talk this week on male and female perspectives on having had to prepare for war as medical personnel and as parents and spouses. ”All of us who went and came back found the transition coming back harder,” Close said. ”We had been moving at such an intense pace over there, it was hard to get used to being home again, and to being together with a family again after being independent.”
Close and Swerdlow never saw any casualties, but they spent the six weeks between January and the start of the ground war in late February preparing for the worst.
”In the beginning, the hardest thing on all of us, including my children, was the uncertainty,” Close said.
Support from her family and colleagues kept her going while she was in Spain and helped eased her back into normal life, she said.
”One of my main fears was that I would be forgotten-sort of out of sight, out of mind, especially if this went on for a long time,” Close said. Instead of being forgotten, however, Close was promoted from staff nurse to her current post.
”Preparing for War: Perspectives of a Man and a Woman” will be presented at noon Wednesday by the Women`s Health Program of Rush North Shore Medical Center, Room 2 of the Good Health Building, 9600 Gross Point Rd., Skokie. For information, call 708-933-6000.
