Katie Brush; nursing specialist traveled to help disaster victims

KATIE BRUSH

Katie Brush was a young child when her parents gave her a little medical bag complete with a toy stethoscope, though by then she had already decided that she would someday be a nurse.

"She came in with the stethoscope, put it on my mother's chest, and said, 'Granny, I know what you have. You have symptoms,' " Kathryn H. Brush said of her daughter. "She always knew what she wanted and never deviated from that."

Nursing took Ms. Brush to Boston, where she worked at Brigham and Women's Hospital for many years and at Massachusetts General Hospital for the past decade. Her profession - to her, it was never simply a job - took her as far away as Armenia, Colombia, Guam, and Iran, where she trained nurses and cared for patients at the sites of natural disasters.

Ms. Brush, a clinical nurse specialist in the surgical intensive care unit at Mass. General, died Dec. 23 in Brigham and Women's Hospital of acute respiratory distress syndrome. She was 50 and had lived in Chelsea for several years, after spending two decades in Brookline.

"Closer to home, Katie applied her extensive clinical knowledge and skills to the Holy Grail of patient safety issues in healthcare: the reduction of hospital-acquired infection," Jeanette Ives Erickson, senior vice president for patient care and chief nurse at Mass. General, wrote in a memo to colleagues after Ms. Brush died.

Ms. Brush was so successful at reducing the infection rate that "Mass. General is currently in the process of replicating Katie's work throughout the hospital," Erickson wrote.

Making rounds each day, Ms. Brush would pause to answer a colleague's question or absorb details from the latest case in the surgical intensive care unit.

"She felt the patients on the unit were her priority," said Susan Tully, nurse director of the Ellison 4 surgical intensive care unit.

Nevertheless, many other priorities were vying for Ms. Brush's attention. As a member of the International Medical-Surgical Response Team, a volunteer organization, she traveled to Iran in 2003 after an earthquake and at other times to Guam and to the Gulf States in the United States after natural disasters.

An advocate for her specialty, she visited Armenia repeatedly after the breakup of the Soviet Union to update medical care that lagged behind most industrial nations. And she went to Medellin, Colombia, to upgrade the quality of nursing when the city was a center of international drug trafficking.

"I think it takes special people to be able to drop everything and go across the globe," Tully said.

Ms. Brush could make friends and relatives tremble with her travels.

"Oh, my goodness," said her mother, who lives in Pawleys Island, S.C. "I prayed for her over every ocean. I prayed for her as a single woman in all these countries. And when she went to South America - good heavens, we got sore knees."

Raised in a family steeped in Southern traditions, Kathryn Ann Brush liked to say that she "grew up in New Jersey in a South house," her mother said. Ms. Brush's mother was from Dallas; her father, Carlton, was from Nashville.

"She learned all the Southern expressions," her mother said. Even when Ms. Brush developed a Boston accent, "she would use them, and people would say, 'Now where did she get that?' "

Graduating with an associate's degree from Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Conn., Ms. Brush worked in New Jersey and moved to Boston in 1979 to join the staff at Brigham and Women's. While there, she finished a bachelor's degree at Northeastern University and later earned a master's in nursing in trauma and critical care from the University of Maryland.

Returning to Massachusetts, she worked at Boston City Hospital before becoming a critical care nurse specialist at Mass. General.

In 2002, Ms. Brush was the 30th critical care nurse in the world to become a fellow of the American College of Critical Care Medicine, according to Mass. General.

"She always came across when you first met her as gruff and tough," said Joanne Hubbard, Ms. Brush's best friend and herself an intensive care nurse in the burn unit at Brigham and Women's. "She was really, really smart and always thinking ahead to the implications of what everything would mean. She really knew her job and was interested in the science of the profession. But underneath the gruffness she was a softie."

Ms. Brush became an unofficial aunt to Hubbard's three children and was just as mothering to her parents and brothers, whose health she monitored from afar as closely as she did patients in her hospital unit.

"She was a very generous person, a very kind and loving person," said her brother Lee of Clinton, N.J. "And she always overdid it for me at Christmas. I would buy something and send it up to her, and I would get a box of stuff from her in the mail."

As a teenager, Ms. Brush and her parents went sailing one day with family friends, spending two nights aboard during a trip from Long Island, N.Y., to the New Jersey shore.

"Well - and this is a Southern expression - she was in hog heaven," her mother said. "She just really loved it."

On and off through her career, Ms. Brush sailed whenever possible, and rekindled her affection for sailing frequently this past summer, her brother said.

"She said one of her best presents was something she got a few years ago, a sextant for Christmas," said Hubbard, who would sometimes spend a summer week with Ms. Brush on Block Island, sailing every day and studying navigation while pursuing a captain's license.

At work, Ms. Brush was the person colleagues looked to for guidance.

"When a new trauma comes in, you're always looking for the unseen injury, picking up on what's going on, what might have been missed," Hubbard said. "And Katie was always right."

In addition to her mother, father, and brother, Ms. Brush leaves another brother, Bob of Carrabelle, Fla.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Jan. 12 in All Saints Church in Pawleys Island, S.C. Burial will be private.