When Norbert “Norb” Schott, RN, met his future wife, Marian Cruz, at Eskenazi Health (then Wishard Hospital), he was awed by her efficiency. Then a student nurse, he watched her assist a patient, arrange the sheets and clean medical equipment in just fifteen minutes. “Oh my goodness,” he recalls thinking, “I gotta work that fast?”

While Schott, who would eventually spend 40 years as a nurse at Eskenazi Health, was then new to the profession, Cruz was already a manager. Schott says he joined the career because he admired nurses’ “sharp” fashion, the “clean white uniform, the cap and their little nursing pin.”

What kept him in this “wonderful, wonderful profession,” however, was just how “natural” it felt after years helping care for siblings as an older brother in a family of seven. He soon realized, he says, that nursing was “my calling.”

After growing up in a male-oriented household, he found himself in the early 1980s in a field dominated by women. Once there, he admits that he initially underestimated the abilities and intelligence of his new female peers. That soon changed.

“They were wonderful to watch at work,” he says, describing his first experiences with nurses at Eskenazi Health. “I just felt close to them …. They took me under their wing…. ”

Foremost among those who impressed him was Cruz. “I was fascinated by Marian,” he says. Drawn together by their mutual Catholic faith, the two soon “formed a wonderful friendship,” says Schott. Just two years after earning his nursing license, they married. The couple moved to an old farmhouse 40 miles west of Indianapolis, where he helped her raise three kids from a previous marriage: Paul, Amy and Leah. “I was overjoyed,” Schott says.

The daughter of farmers, Marian Schott had a lot to teach her new husband about rustic life, he says. Their home had no central air or heating, only a burner and wood stove. “She loved it. She was rugged, not me,” he says, remembering her climbing under their floor to check on frozen pipes. “I guess this is probably my job,” Schott recalls thinking, “but she’s doing it.” He was also “just amazed” by his wife’s green thumb, he says, realizing that he and his brothers would have drowned the African violets that flourished under her care.

After his training at Eskenazi Health, the two had been working in “proximity” rather than together, but Schott discovered in their long work commutes that his wife, who would one day be a shift supervisor, had much to teach him about people as well. She was a mentor to new employees, including Yetta “Roz” Wolen, RN, now a staff nurse for Eskenazi Health Acuity Adaptable. Wolen called her “a wonderful nurse,” “a great teacher” and a “force of humanity.” Schott says his wife’s insights about the needs of her staff helped him during those drives “understand human beings.”

That understanding of others was something Schott applied at work. In four decades at Eskenazi Health, he never stopped enjoying patients. In fact, he remembers at one point being “told not to talk to the patients so much.” Near the end of his career, when he worked in Eskenazi Health Endoscopy, Schott loved reminding patients that they were not, in fact, dying of hunger before their colonoscopies.

He always valued the continuous learning of the profession, the need to adapt to new procedures and equipment. For many years, Schott recalls, patients were moved to different floors for various health care services. While grateful that now that practice has changed, he remembers so much else about his nursing days with fondness.

Schott revives his former commute some days, now as a patient of Robin Beck, M.D., physician at Eskenazi Health Senior Care. “Oh senior care is sweet,” Schott says. “All I can tell you is they really cater to you. They check all your labs …. You don’t have to worry about your immunizations for flu or for COVID. They keep track of it.” He also appreciates his visits with the “absolutely wonderful” and “top notch” Chi-Wah “Rudy” Yung, M.D., chief of ophthalmology services at Eskenazi Health.

His wife died more than a decade ago, but Schott feels “blessed” to still live on their old property, shaded by the 30-foot pine trees she once planted and practicing skills she taught him. Recently, he was fertilizing a raised garden, built when she was in a wheelchair in her final illness. “I’m already thinking about when I’m going to put my tomatoes in,” he says.

“You can smell good dirt,” he muses. “ Isn’t that something?”