CLASS NOTES
ALUMNI PROFILE
Drawn by the Lights and Drama By Robin Shear
In Memoriam Karolina Wiech , A.B.S.N. ’14 , R.N., C.N.O.R., was a Chicago-based registered nurse and an artist. A fellow student from her graduating class informed faculty member Juan González of the sad news that Wiech died in January 2023. “Karolina was a very kind and brilliant student who received our academic award,” says Dr. González. “This is truly heartbreaking.” A student in the accelerated nursing program, Wiech joined the Multicultural Nursing Student Association, served as class representative for the National Student Nurses’ Association, and volunteered at the Miller School of Medicine’s DOCS health fairs. In addition, she was invited into the nursing honor society, Sigma Theta Tau International. She graduated magna cum laude and received the SONHS Excellence in Academic and Clinical Performance Award. Wiech went on to work as an operating room nurse and safety of cer, as well as a perioperative nursing educator with a talent for transformational nursing
Ann Marie McCrystal,
B.S.N. ’59, has been committed to the mission of the Visiting Nurse
Association (VNA) since
helping bring the well-known nonpro t organization to Vero Beach in 1975. For nearly 50 years, including as board chair, she has been instrumental in growing VNA Home Care and Hospice resources for residents of Florida’s Treasure Coast. “I’m doing something to help someone every day, not just for my own family or very good friends, but in the community and beyond,” says McCrystal, 86. “It’s a good feeling to go to bed at night knowing that if you close your eyes and never wake again, you have done something in your life that mattered, that meant something to somebody.” Once upon a time, however, she expected a very different future. An accomplished teen accordion player, McCrystal performed in Miami Beach hotels and on cruises. In 1955, she came to the University of Miami as a freshman, intent on an acting career, she explained during her SONHS Alumna of Distinction speech in 2017. But a new path was soon illuminated by her nighttime view of Doctors Hospital from campus. “I saw all those lights on inside, drawing me. I believe there was some higher power that pointed me towards Doctors Hospital, saying, ‘Ann Marie, this is your destiny and you’ve got to take it,’” she recalls. “This was something I had to explore.” Nursing 101 was relatively new at the College of Arts & Sciences. “We had our classes in makeshift cottages we called Cardboard College,” she says. “I paid $25 for a yellow uniform with a white
leadership, she stated on LinkedIn. In 2021, she contributed her mosaic sculpture to the “COVID and Caring” art show at her workplace, AMITA Health. She wrote in her artist statement, “The seeds of resilience are planted in the way we process the negative and most dif cult events in our lives.” In May 2022, Weich’s rst public commissioned artwork was displayed as part of “Shrines of Resilience,” a collection of women invited to make “altars of hope, re ection, and intention.” Her goal, she said, was to spread love, hope, resilience, beauty, and compassion one step (or mosaic) at a time. Her 3-D artwork, “Living,” depicted the tree of life. It was one of 25 works exhibited along Chicago’s Bloomingdale Trail, an elevated park oating 18 feet above city streets. In her artist statement, Weich wrote “You are not alone. We are all branches of a greater wholeness. The trunk of the tree represents motherhood and the source of creation. On one side, the sun represents the start of a new dawn: a chance for a new day and a new future. The moon and windy night on the opposite side represents that even though we feel we are in the darkness, there is light from the moon illuminating our path; the wind teaches us to be exible and ow with life’s ups and downs. It is after a big storm that the sun comes out! And just like the owers and nature around us that require respite and trusting the unseen periods of growth to bloom to their full potential, so do we.”
and fundraising for the local theater guild, the VNA, VNA Hospice House, and Indian River Medical Center. In addition, she served on the SONHS Visiting Committee at a time of transformative growth for the school. Eight years ago, McCrystal was appointed to the Indian River County Hospital District Board of Trustees, stepping down just recently to care for her husband. “Through it all, I was always very proud of the nursing profession and the B.S.N. I received from the University of Miami,” says McCrystal. In fact, she acknowledges, she would go on for her doctorate degree if she were starting her career today. “Continue your education,” she advises current students. “Every day there is something to learn that can assist you in your ability to help people through health care. If you would like to make a difference in a life, there isn’t a better, more rewarding calling than nursing.”
pinafore and mortarboard nurse’s cap.” She still has the original cap she wore at UM. That summer, McCrystal observed her rst surgery. “As soon as I walked into the operating room, I knew that was the drama I needed in my life,” she says. A day after graduating, she went to work at Jackson Memorial Hospital and later ran its open heart surgical OR—Florida’s rst. “Every day I went to work at JMH as an OR nurse was exciting,” says McCrystal. “I just knew I was home.” Jackson was also where she met surgical intern Hugh McCrystal. After marrying, the pair moved to Washington, D.C. He was a urology resident at Georgetown Hospital, while she set up the VA’s open heart OR, at times scrubbing in with Dr. Charles Hufnagel, inventor of the rst arti cial heart valve. Returning to Florida in 1966, McCrystal stayed busy raising three children, running her husband’s urology practice,
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34 heart beat | SPRING 2023
SPRING 2023 | heart beat 35
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