In concert: L+M anesthetist finds community in dual pursuits

New London ― She started taking piano lessons when she was 5 years old and took up the violin, a bit belatedly, at 10. At 13, she was practicing six to eight hours a day.

She wanted to be a professional musician.

Now 42, Lydia Lee-Villarreal, a certified registered nurse anesthetist, or CRNA, at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital, remembers performing Samuel Barber’s plaintive “Adagio for Strings” as a high school freshman in Texas.

Decades later, on the website of the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, she would write of the experience: “It was magic.”

Lee-Villarreal, an East Lyme resident whose family emigrated from South Korea when she was 6, has played second violin with the ECSO since 2005. In recent years, she’s juggled the demands of music and medicine as well as a family that includes a teenage daughter.

The seemingly disparate pursuits have parallels.

“My dad wanted to become a pastor,” Lee-Villarreal said during an interview outside the hospital last week. “He came to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, and I grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area playing piano and violin in church settings. I got comfortable playing in front of people.”

In high school, during which she moved from Texas to California, she realized the competition among would-be professional musicians would be fierce. While volunteering at a hospital, she developed an interest in medicine.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in violin performance at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, at the same time pursuing a premed track.

She met her husband, Gino Villarreal, when both were Baylor students.

“In an ICU (intensive care unit), it’s all about service, as is playing music in a church,” Lee-Villarreal said. “In dealing with patients, I try to maintain a sense of humanity. That’s the best part about doing both medicine and music. It keeps you rooted.”

She said many of her high school friends who were musicians ended up pursuing medical careers.

A prescient conversation

Lee-Villarreal arrived in Connecticut in 2005 when her husband, an orchestral trumpeter, won a position with the U.S. Coast Guard Band, which is stationed at the Coast Guard Academy in New London. He had previously served in the U.S. Military Academy Band at West Point, N.Y.

In 2009, their daughter, Isabella, whom they call “Izzy,” was born at L+M.

During the cesarean delivery, Lee-Villarreal and her husband had what turned out to be a prescient conversation with Dr. Thomas Miett, the anesthesiologist who anesthetized Lee-Villarreal. At the time, Lee-Villarreal was preparing to apply to medical school.

“He convinced me to go to nursing school,” she said of Miett, who sold her on the notion of a career as an anesthetist ― an advanced practice registered nurse who specializes in anesthesiology. Anesthetists are qualified to do virtually everything an anesthesiologist does.

Lee-Villarreal would earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Connecticut and a doctorate from the Yale New Haven Hospital School of Nurse Anesthesia and complete a residency at Backus Hospital in Norwich.

In 2019, after two years at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, she joined the staff at L+M, where she had the chance to work alongside Miett, who left the hospital in 2020 and retired last year.

“She was a wonderful addition to the department,” Miett said, “very smart, very pleasant and engaging, great with patients and colleagues ― a violinist, an anesthetist, a mother.”

The multifacetedness of her life already was of note.

Ann Bassett, the chief CRNA for L+M’s Department of Anesthesia and the Northeast Medical Group, schedules 10 to 12 CRNAs a day in covering the anesthesiology needs of six L+M operating rooms, an endoscopy suite, obstetrics and the surgery department at Pequot Health Center in Groton. She regularly accommodates Lee-Villarreal and others.

“Working in health care is difficult and challenging,” Bassett said. “My philosophy is if you can help people with their work and their life ― family and extracurriculars ― it makes them appreciate their work more.”

During its October-to-May concert season, the ECSO typically rehearses from midweek to the end of the week, with performances on Saturday evenings.

“So I try not to give her late shifts. We work very nicely together,” Bassett said of Lee-Villarreal.

Lee-Villarreal’s story, including her early childhood in South Korea and her commitment to higher education, has inspired her colleagues, many of whom have attended ECSO concerts to watch her perform.

Bassett said people who work in health care often have another calling.

“Musical gifts lead to hobbies for some people, but for others it’s more,” she said. “We have a plastic surgeon who plays in a two-man band. In health care, because it is so stressful, people find other avenues to relieve the stress. They’re marathoners, triathletes, artists ...”

Bassett said both music and medicine revolve around teamwork. Doctors, nurses, technicians and everyone else toiling in hospital settings have to work together “in concert,” she said, just as members of an orchestra must.

Joan Winters, the ECSO’s principal second violin, said she developed a relationship with Lee-Villarreal because of who she is as a person.

“I was impressed with her ambition to become a nurse, having the demands of home,” she said. “She always knew what she wanted to do.”

For orchestra members, the concert season can be arduous.

“You have to practice. You don’t just show up and wing it,” Winters said. “When we did ‘Don Juan’ last year, it required a lot of preparation. Lydia had to figure out how to save lives, go to school, practice and come to orchestra. She did it all.”

Winters recounted an incident on the opening night of rehearsals for the ECSO’s 2022-23 season when Lee-Villarreal's medical background proved crucial. Minutes into the rehearsal, the president of the ECSO’s board of directors, Liane Crawford, became ill, nearly losing consciousness.

“Her medical skills kicked in,” Winters said of Lee-Villarreal, who immediately assessed the situation and summoned assistants who rushed Crawford to the hospital.

Lee-Villarreal's daughter, a rising sophomore at East Lyme High School, plays the flute and, naturally enough, has an interest in medicine. Currently volunteering at Backus, she wants to be a cardiothoracic surgeon, according to her mother.

Lee-Villarreal's mother, Joanne, lives with the family, providing a support system that helps with the juggling of pursuits.

“It’s humbling,” Lee-Villarreal said of her circumstances, which seem to have come together. “I know I’m in the right place, with a 12-minute commute, colleagues who’ve heard me play ... a sense of community.”

After five years at L+M, she’s seen some patients more than once.

“They depend on us to know what we’re doing,” she said of anesthetists. “We have 15 minutes, 30 minutes to meet them, befriend them. We establish a rapport with them, then knock them out. Then you wake them up and tell them they did great. That’s so satisfying.”

She said she still retains “the Korean values of respect, hard work, resilience.”

At one point she thought about getting a law degree.

b.hallenbeck@theday.com