Hampton Bays EMT plays both healer and patient

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At 44, Laureen Gerzack is finally learning how to accept help from other people, not give it.

It’s hard for her. For the last seven years, Ms. Gerzack made a second career of the Hampton Bays Volunteer Ambulance, logging an average of 50 calls a year as an emergency medical technician while she worked as a nurse at the nearby Stony Brook University Outpatient Services Center. Helping people fulfilled her, she said. It made her feel useful.

But in 2007, as her kidneys began to fail after years of health problems related to childhood onset diabetes, she was forced to make the transition from healer to patient. That’s when she began dialysis three days a week. The direst blow in a lifelong battle with the illness came about nine weeks ago, when doctors amputated her left leg up to the knee after the calcification of her blood vessels left her foot blighted and infected.

Since then, a woman who prides herself on her independence is learning how to rely on others for basic tasks. She once loved to hike trails in upstate New York, she said. Now she uses a walker to get around her friend’s Hampton Bays apartment, where she lives. She once rode in the back of an ambulance. Now a medical transport service carries her down the stairs on a stretcher to take her to dialysis.

“It takes away your freedom is what it does,” she said.

Often confined to her friend’s apartment, Ms. Gerzack said she’s taken up cooking. She does everything with one arm, because she uses the walker to support herself with the other. When she stirs, she said, she stirs until she gets tired from holding herself up, then sits down. Then gets up and stirs again. She also reads and does crossword puzzles.

“It’s almost like a home prison,” she said.

Ms. Gerzack has deep roots in Hampton Bays. She grew up in the hamlet until her family moved to Texas when she was 8, but she moved back at 21. While she lived in Texas, she said, she missed the ocean. She kept a painting in her room of sand dunes and sea grass to remind her of home.

She joined the ambulance company in 2002, after driving past its Ponquogue Avenue headquarters for years on her way to work. For years after that, she was part of a regular Saturday night crew.

Her fellow EMTs said Ms. Gerzack always stood out for her diminutive stature and her sense of humor. It’s her sense of humor, Ms. Gerzack said, that helps her cope with her illness now. She still cracks jokes about her health, said Melissa Aube, a close friend and the current secretary of the Hampton Bays Volunteer Ambulance.

For instance, Ms. Gerzack likes to tell people she’s 4 feet 11 inches tall, weighs 88 pounds and has three kidneys and two pancreases. The extra organs come from a pair of transplants in which doctors decided to leave the original, damaged organs inside.

“Whoever does my autopsy is going to be a little shocked,” she said.

Ms. Gerzack’s life has been a series of health-related ups and downs which, she said, gave her perspective on her patients and inspired her, in part, to go into health care in the first place.

She was diagnosed with diabetes at age 13, and over the following three decades she suffered a diabetic coma, some eyesight loss, neuralgia and kidney failure as a result. In 1999, she got a new kidney after her adoptive father turned out to be a match—a coincidence Ms. Gerzack deems “a miracle.”

Heesuck Suh, her father’s doctor at Stony Brook University Medical Center, where the surgery was performed, became a friend to Ms. Gerzack after the transplant and remained a mentor over the years, Ms. Gerzack said. Dr. Suh said she remembers that Ms. Gerzack stood out for her positive outlook throughout her hardships.

It was Dr. Suh who pushed Ms. Gerzack to get the pancreas transplant in 2005 that cured her diabetes. The pancreas came from a cadaver. After the surgery, the neuropathic pain faded away and her eyesight began to return.

But by then, even the transplanted kidney had been ravaged beyond repair by the diabetes. By 2007, Ms. Gerzack’s body was unable to filter the toxins out of her blood without the help of dialysis. The dialysis leaves her feeling weak and lethargic, she said. She described the feeling of having her blood pumped out and filtered through a machine as “traumatic.”

She was eventually forced to stop responding to ambulance calls and leave work on disability. She had just been voted into her third term as the ambulance company’s treasurer.

The problems with Ms. Gerzack’s left foot started this January. It began to ache. Her body, even aided by dialysis, wasn’t able to manage the levels of certain elements in her blood. A buildup of calcium began to stiffen her blood vessels, choking her feet of circulation and causing an infection in the left one.