Faces Of Nantucket: Roberta Santos

Faces of Nantucket: Roberta Santos

Years on the island: 43

Wearing a plastic tiara and her white lab coat while holding a piece of celebratory cake, Roberta Santos walked out of Nantucket Cottage Hospital on Thursday for the final time as an x-ray technologist.

After 43 years on the job at NCH - having cared for thousands of patients and completed countless numbers of x-rays, mammograms, ultrasounds, and CAT scans - Santos is retiring from a job and a career that she loved.

“I can’t believe it,” she said on Thursday, a few minutes after being feted by her coworkers in the hospital cafeteria. “I’m a little emotional because this has been a part of my life for a long time. I love the people I work with and I’ve been here for so long. I’ve made a lot of friends. There’s so much history.”

When she took the job at NCH in 1981, patients and staff were still allowed to smoke inside the hospital. The x-rays were done with film and cassettes in a darkroom. NCH did not yet offer CAT scans, ultrasounds, or mammograms - technologies that Santos would master later in her career. And the hospital suffered frequent power outages, forcing imaging to be done on a portable GE unit in a back room.

Times have changed and the technology has advanced, but the friendly, personal touch Santos had with her patients and colleagues remained constant over more than four decades.

She’s cared for several generations of people on Nantucket, and the realities of providing care in a small town - seeing your patients at the grocery store or while getting a cup of coffee - were among the aspects of her job that she enjoyed the most.

“I'd be in the grocery store, and the moms would say to their kids, ‘See that lady over there, she saw you while you were in my tummy’,” she said with a laugh. “I saw them in utero. I saw them as babies - because everybody would bring their baby in to show me - and then I saw them grow up. And now they're having babies, and you don't get that everywhere, you know?”

Originally from Seekonk, Mass., Santos was just 21 years old when she first came to Nantucket. At that time, she was working at Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket when her friend and fellow x-ray technologist told her she was taking a job at NCH, and that they might have a position for Santos as well. At first Santos was skeptical, but decided to make the trip from New Bedford for an interview.

“I said, ‘Well, I've never been to Nantucket, so I could just go for the interview and I can pretend like I'm interested in the job so I can see the island’,” she said. “And I saw it from the sky, and it was so beautiful sitting in the water. It looked like a pork chop. That's what I always think of…So we landed, and we came to the hospital. Nancy Jones was the administrative assistant. She picked us up, brought us to the hospital, and I saw all the houses with the shingles, and it was so beautiful. And then she took us downtown to kill some time to have some lunch, while we waited for Mr. (Paul) McNamara (the hospital administrator), and I saw the cobblestones and everything. And I was like, ‘I want that job’.”

Within a few months, Santos had met her future husband - Tom Santos - and the couple would go on to get married and have two children. Both, of course, were born at NCH.

First up for Santos in retirement is a trip to the Bahamas, and after that, she said her plan is to stay on Nantucket and look for volunteer opportunities to stay involved in the community while spending more time with her family.

“I'm gonna miss my patients the most, and my colleagues, of course, and other people in the hospital,” Santos said. “I’ve always enjoyed seeing the people that I take care of.”