Michele Huddleston
by Andrew Schwartz
In late 1990, Michele Huddleston was a recent nursing graduate from Ohio State University. She was enjoying her first job, but saw commissioning as a naval officer as a means of getting specialized training as a nurse anesthetist.
Huddleston intended to serve one stint in the military - five years active, three reserve. Fifteen years later, she remains in the Navy, a career that has taken her from California to Italy, Kazakhstan and around the horn of South America.
Today, the former Ensign Huddleston - who got her master's degree in what was at the time the Critical Care/ER Trauma program at UCSF School of Nursing - is Commander Huddleston and director of nursing aboard the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), the Navy's most recent addition to its aircraft carrier fleet.
A Change of Focus
Huddleston began her career at the now decommissioned Oakland Naval Hospital. "I found out rather quickly," she says, "that the Navy is in the business of making deployable, generalist nurses."
This turned out to be a blessing. She began rotating through various assignments - including a medical-surgical ward, the coronary care section of the ICU, and the emergency room and cardiac catheterization lab - and rather than her original interest in anesthesia, Huddleston found herself drawn to critical care. "It was more akin to my personality," she says.
She also learned to appreciate naval life in a way she hadn't anticipated. In 1994, when she began to consider whether she would simply finish out her original commitment or reenlist, Huddleston decided, "There was nothing out there the Navy couldn't provide."
Overseas and Back Again
She accepted a transfer to Naples, Italy, a three-and-a-half-year active duty commitment at the headquarters for NATO forces in southern Europe. Once more, however, the Navy's desire to produce generalists pulled Huddleston away from her primary interest. She served first in the nursery, and then was cross-trained in labor and delivery.
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Though that switch may have been mildly frustrating, the compensation was that Huddleston also was being "cross-trained" in working with cultures from all over Europe. "It was fascinating to watch the different cultural responses to disease states," she says.
The hands-on, cross-cultural work continued when the Navy sent her on a four-month humanitarian mission to Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, providing education and training at medical facilities there. "It was still the old-style Soviet health care system, which was quite different, with a different sense of the state's responsibility and a different sense of how individuals should take care of themselves," she says.
Upon her return to Naples in 1995, she became division officer for the emergency room. Over the next two years, she would spend time in ob-gyn, general surgery and ENT clinics. She also began performing one of the primary functions of the naval nursing corps: training corpsmen - navy medics - for operational functions, so they could perform medical procedures in the heat of battle.
Returning to the US in 1997, Huddleston was assigned to the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, one of the three such centers in the country. There, she moved from orthopedics to neurosurgery to the ICU, continued teaching corpsmen and added the responsibility of training her fellow nurses.
UCSF
In 2002, after over a decade of naval nursing, Huddleston was thrilled when the Navy agreed to pay for her master's education at UCSF. "It was a chance to step out," she says of the two-year period when she did clinical work at San Francisco General, Highland and Stanford hospitals. At Stanford, she even did a stretch in their Life Flight helicopter.
"UCSF introduced me to diverse ways of approaching clinical problems in a larger world with a more diverse patient population," she says. "It was an important learning time where I met wonderful people and a wonderful adviser - Barbara Drew."
After receiving her master's degree, Huddleston owed the Navy an additional four years of service. Originally slotted to teach junior personnel, she leapt when offered a position as the director of nursing services and director of training aboard the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76), one of only 12 such positions in the entire US Navy. The carrier is a massive operation, like a city at sea, with about 3,000 personnel, two nuclear reactors and room for 87 aircraft onboard. On the flight deck, planes come and go as at a busy airport.
Life Aboard Ship
"Being a ship's nurse is unique," says Huddleston. The medical staff is small and tight-knit, with each staff member responsible for a wide range of duties. On the trip through the Straits of Magellan, Huddleston assisted in 30 surgeries, from mole removals to gall bladders and appendectomies; this in addition to being available for primary care concerns 24/7.
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"In blue water, your ability to get patients to a higher level of care is limited. You're here, you're it, and you have to be very confident in your skills - and very judicious with your supplies," she says.
But clinical care is only the beginning of her duties. Huddleston also maintains a full teaching and training load for corpsmen (they operate under her license), fellow nurses and other ship personnel. And she performs the ship's quality assurance and risk management functions for its medical care. During "shore time," she's the liaison with the local hospital.
Though it's demanding, Huddleston takes obvious pride in the work she does and in the way the Navy operates. She notes that the preventive care aboard ship is outstanding. "We need to minimize the sick time of our workforce," she says. "Immunizations are checked and updated each year. Twice a year we are given an exercise test, and if you don't meet a certain level, you are automatically put on an exercise program. It seems as though that philosophy could be applied to the general population."
She's also been impressed with the opportunities available to women. "We have about 600 women who do nearly any job aboard this ship: F-18 pilots, helicopter pilots, nuclear reactor technicians, women on the flight deck," she says.
Huddleston's onboard service ends in June 2006. At the moment, she is gearing up for a six-month deployment, the timing and location of which she can't discuss. She doesn't worry, however, about the danger. "On an aircraft carrier, we're well protected, with an entire battle group that protects us, serving as a kind of shield."
An Extraordinary Education
Huddleston began her naval career with modest ambitions, hoping to get a little specialized training that, at the time, would have been difficult to get elsewhere. She didn't anticipate that 15 years later, in addition to an advanced degree from one of the nation's top nursing schools, she would have risen to the rank of commander (the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in the Army), traveled the world and moved from one specialty to another.
"It certainly has had its rewards," she says.
