With a busy job as the only medical technologist at Myrah Keating Smith Community Health Center on St. John, an active life enjoying the island’s natural resources and a growing list of memberships in St. John community organizations, Steve Echelmeier is settling in nicely to island life.
“It helps that I grew up in a small town of 4,000 people. It’s not like I have to have the big city,” he said.
Echelmeier, 57, was raised in Higginsville, Missouri. From there he went on to get a bachelor’s degree in biology from Missouri State University. Undecided as to a career, he took a hospital tour and was intrigued by the medical technological field.
After a year of clinical studies, he landed his first job at a lab in Tucson, Arizona. Then it was back to Missouri, where he worked his way up to lab manager. It was a job he said came with lots of stress.
“I was working 60 hours a week to fill in for vacancies,” he said.
A divorce convinced him to become a traveling medical technologist, a situation similar to the traveling nurses that help staff the island’s medical facilities.
“I decided to become a free agent,” he said.
While he did spend some time in Kalamazoo, Michigan, most of his travels took him to such far flung locations as Homer, Anchorage and Sitka, in Alaska, the Hawaiian island of Molokai, and for the first time in 2009, to the Schneider Regional Medical Center on St. Thomas. While working at Schneider, he discovered St. John.
When he got an offer of a permanent job at Myrah Keating, he jumped.
“I said ‘Sign me up,’” he said.
The job does come with some challenges, such as the fact it takes time to get supplies shipped in, but he said he really likes the diversity the job provides.
And he especially enjoys the fact that he gets to work with the patients. He said that at other medical facilities, analysis was so mechanized that he was only running machines. At Myrah Keating, he gets to interact with patients as well as do the analysis.
He said he also enjoys the variety of patients. He sees everything from born-in-the-Virgin-Islands folks to long-term residents to recent transplants to tourists.
“It’s a very diverse group of people,” he said, adding that the job he had on the very small island of Molokai was similar.
Echelmeier is on duty Mondays through Fridays. With the arrival of some more sophisticated equipment, the nurses on duty at Myrah Keating can handle the weekend lab work, though he said he sometimes gets calls for assistance.
He hasn’t found St. John confining. He’s made trips to the mainland to visit his children. Alexandra, 28, lives in Kansas City and teaches at a community college. Austin, 22, is working on his doctorate degree in Tempe, Arizona.
He often heads off to St. Thomas for events and to visit friends he made while working at Schneider. He takes in the offerings at the St. John Film Society, has joined the St. John Historical Society and spends weekends hiking St. John’s many trails and scuba diving.
“I’m a certified rescue diver,” he said.
As for his future, he expects to keep working for another 10 years. He said he’d like to have a base on St. John with a live-aboard sailboat, but wants to buy a camper – maybe an Airstream – to travel the country.
“So I can visit my children and see all the national parks,” he said.
