The
5 MEDICAL PEOPLE OF INTEREST
SURFING
PEDIATRICIAN
BY WILLI MILLER
PHOTO BY ED DRONDOSKI
Vero Beach pediatrician Susie O’Toole is a happy
74
woman whether she’s hanging 10 or hanging
out with her newly blended family of five.
She and her husband, Chuck Evans, assistant
principal of Oslo Middle School in Vero Beach,
have made a family of her two sons and his daughter, all
of them avid surfers. They took their first family trip this
summer to Costa Rica and loved it enough to put down at
least part-time roots, she says. “We surfed from the south
Pacific up to the central Pacific and just fell in love with a
little house tucked away in the rain forest at Hermosa. It’s
the most darling cabin, like a North Carolina hunting cabin,
five kilometers down a bumpy road from the beach.”
O’Toole was in her 40s when her love for surfing began.
It was on a family visit to Vero Beach in 1990, when, as a
single mother, she watched her boys enjoying the sport and
decided she was not going to sit on the beach while they
were out there having fun in the water.
“So we all started to surf together, and it just blossomed
from there.” A few years ago, O’Toole’s combined interests
in surfing and yoga led her to a women’s surf and yoga
camp in Costa Rica. “And that was it,” she says. “That was
when I fell in love with Costa Rica and got really deep in
my practice of yoga. It was funny to find later that my husband
had been going to that same area.”
Next to her wedding ring, O’Toole’s surfboard is her
most treasured possession. It was a gift from board shaper
Charles Williams, whose shop is at O’Toole’s favorite surfing
spot, the north jetty at Fort Pierce Inlet. “His wife, an
amazing surfer, was bitten by a shark. I sewed her up and
my board was his gift to me.”
As head of the pediatrics department at Indian River
Medical Center, O’Toole works closely with the nursing staff
with a goal of making the mother and baby unit there the
best on the Treasure Coast. In her private practice, O’Toole
and partner Dr. Genevieve Mallon are surrounded by a
hardworking staff of dedicated women. “They keep me going
and make me look forward to each day,” O’Toole says.
“I learn something new every day and each one is different
and exciting.”
O’Toole spent the first 10 years of her medical career as a
neonatal intensive care unit nurse after she graduated from
St. Luke’s Hospital School of Nursing in Massachusetts. She
returned to school for her medical degree, with an internship
and residency
at Children’s
Hospital
Boston. “I loved
neonatology, but
when I got to
medical school
I realized I wanted
to see the
whole spectrum
of kids from
birth through
college.”
“It was a
privilege to
work with some
of the greatest
minds. Every
day we saw and
learned so much.
It inspired me
to always look for the hidden symptom and to remember
to ‘think out of the box’ when you see or hear something
unusual from a patient or family.”
O’Toole says she’s often asked why she ended up in
small-town America after training in a program as highly
regarded as the one at Children’s Hospital Boston at Harvard.
“I tell them that it’s because all of those children who
came to us at Children’s came from some little place.”
O’Toole says the Boston hospital provided her with
memories she can use now to the benefit of her Treasure
Coast patients.
“You have to have that visual memory scanning every
day. It’s like having an encyclopedia. We saw so much every
day, with children coming from around the world.”
The unusual cases presented to her at Children’s will
stay in her memory forever, she says. “It’s so important to
recognize some of these problems, recognize a syndrome, an
illness before it takes hold.”
As much as she enjoys her career, if all goes well, O’Toole
and her husband, both 55, will find a way to put it all together
in Costa Rica someday.
“Who knows what will happen in 10 years? We’d love to
be retired snowbirds in Costa Rica, and there’s a wonderful
clinic there in Jaco. I’d like to see them be able to use my
help. I’d like to give back.”
Until then, the couple are taking Spanish lessons and >>