Here is a scene that could only happen in the movies–a Whoopi Gold-berg film like “Sister Act.” A nun is cruising down Lake Shore Drive in a gorgeous Cadillac. The front windows are open. Her headdress is flapping in the wind and Beethoven is playing softly on an expensive sound system.
The image is too incongruous for real-life nun Nancy Streitmatter, 53, who also is a staff cardiologist at Holy Cross Hospital on Chicago’s South Side. She gave up fancy cars and sound systems when she joined the Sisters of St. Casimir in 1984. For several years before that, though, she enjoyed the good life that comes with being a well-paid physician.
By the early 1980s, she had attained a respected status in her profession. Although she never considered herself to be materialistic, she admits she liked certain fine items. She owned a luxury vehicle. She loved music and had bought a piano and a top-notch stereo. She owned some property and held other investments. She was charitable. And she prayed daily.
“I lived a very good life,” she said. “There was nothing about it that I didn’t like.”
Then her life changed.
At the time, she was a Protestant and facing a period of “real spiritual growth and questioning.” She started conversing with one of the nuns at Holy Cross on matters of spirituality. Those conversations led Streitmatter to convert to Catholicism.
A few years later, she took her vows to become a nun. It was a step, she says, that was not what she wanted to do as much as what she felt “called to do.”
Streitmatter entered the convent informally and gradually divested herself of most of her material possessions. Separating herself from the prestige that came with her achievements was another matter. It was the most difficult part of her decision, she said.
“It was terribly hard,” she said. “I had to give up the position I had at Illinois Masonic Hospital. I think I was a well-respected cardiologist in a very respected group, and I had no idea what life would hold for me.”
That was perhaps one of the few times in her life, though, that Streitmatter was so uncertain.
As a child growing up on a small farm in Toulon, Ill., she knew at an early age that she wanted a career in medicine, a career helping others. She knew that despite the fact that it was her father’s dream for her three brothers–not her–to go to college.
“No one helped me at that time. It was not a time when people encouraged women to be physicians,” she said.
Sitting in her office recently, she laughed quietly as she recalled a childhood memory, a moment of knowing what her life could hold. Once, after Streitmatter’s mother had prepared a whole chicken for dinner, the young girl removed the cooked flesh from the bird so she could study its anatomy.
“I was fascinated about how the body worked,” she said.
Streitmatter also was captivated by books. “I read everything in the world. I was a voracious reader, but medical things really interested me,” she said.
Through reading, she found a role model in Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a theologian and humanitarian who has been called the greatest Christian of the early 1900s.
“I had a real desire to be of help, to take care of people, and I thought I would be a nurse, but one night I was going to bed and I sat up and said `I just want to be a doctor,’ ” she said, remembering that moment.
As she prepared to graduate from high school in 1965, her counselor told her she shouldn’t become a doctor because it was not a woman’s profession–something she heard over and over.
She persisted and made it to college, enrolling at MacMurray in Jacksonville, Ill., on a scholarship. When it was time to take the medical school entrance exam, she had not prepared for it. She wasn’t even aware that it was something she was supposed to do. Still, she did well, and was accepted at Loyola University’s medical school in Maywood, where she spent the next nine years studying and completing an internship and fellowship.
After her fellowship ended, she joined a group of staff cardiologists at Loyola, working also at Holy Cross and Illinois Masonic hospitals. While at Loyola, she helped set up its echocardiography lab. When she had a chance to be in charge of the lab, she declined because a private practice she had established had become too busy.
Today at Holy Cross, she sits on several of its medical committees. She also treats patients at St. Basil’s free clinic in Garfield Ridge once a week and routinely conducts educational talks for local community groups. She also is the director of the Holy Cross Intensive Care Unit.
Gone are the uncertainties that haunted her when she was a new nun: “Would anyone accept me as a nun and a physician? How would that go over? Would I ever again be offered a chance to be in charge of the echocardiography lab?
“When I entered, the [religious] community, in essence, had the power to tell me–if they decided– that they didn’t want a physician,” she said. The order could have told her to “go teach” or “go scrub floors. I didn’t think they would do that but it was a very scary thing not knowing what that would hold.”
Today, Streitmatter believes she is better for the experience, and she is not alone in her thinking.
Michael Peterson, interim CEO for Holy Cross Hospital, agrees.
“Dr. Streitmatter is a kind, caring individual. . . . She journeys with her patients not only from a medical position, but spiritual as well. She works to heal not only the body but the soul, regardless of the patient’s religion.”
“The most important thing to me is my relationship to God,” Streitmatter said. “And how I bring something of me to the people that I take care of as a physician and work with and live with and deal with. . . . Friends are very important, family is very important; but that’s all in relation to what is my relationship with God.”
And perhaps because of that relationship, she often sees more that needs to be done. In U.S. health care, for instance, she sees a system that is eroding and filled with inequities.
“Some of it is just schizophrenic,” she said. For example, in the Medicare system, she said, “you can’t do a screening test for diabetes and have Medicare pay for it, or for cholesterol, which are some of our bigger health issues. But, if you’ve got diabetes or a problem with cholesterol, [Medicare will] pay for it to be followed up.”
Also, she said, too often physicians must concern themselves with issues that impede patient care, like the mounds of paperwork needed to document every move. Physicians are often concerned with whether patients can afford care or afford their medicine or whether the hospitals in poor areas will be able to sustain themselves.
Similarly, the Catholic Church faces challenges, she believes, on the issues of homosexuals in the church, birth control and abortion. In both major areas of her life–medicine and religion–there are tensions, she said. But that isn’t necessarily bad because it can be an opportunity for growth. Although Streitmatter isn’t sure how she will make progress in those arenas, she is ready for the challenge, she said.
This summer she is brushing up on her Spanish and, in October, she will spend two weeks on a medical mission in Bolivia. Aside from that, “Whatever comes up, that is what I will take on and try to make some impact,” she said.
