By Dave Person
Nearly two dozen years ago, Nick Bowers walked out of Parchment High School for the last time as a student and into a world that can be painful, sorrowful and scary.
His mission was, and still is, to make those times as easy as possible for others.
Since graduating from PHS, Bowers has been an emergency medical technician, a paramedic, a registered nurse and now a certified registered nurse anesthetist at medical facilities in the Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids area.
“I work alongside surgeons and other providers to provide anesthesia and keep patients comfortable,” he says. “Nurse anesthetists can work independently or with a physician to provide safe and effective care.
“I’m personally proud to have been involved in various emergencies, mothers in labor, helping NICU babies and organ donations and transplants.”
Bowers, 40, is a resident of Otsego where he lives with his wife, Morgan, and three daughters, Haven, Hope and Harper.
The 2002 graduate of PHS describes himself as a late bloomer.
“I wasn’t the most disciplined or organized of students in middle and high school,” he says. “Those were lessons I had to learn later.”
It started shortly after graduation when he went to work for Pride Care Ambulance, first as an EMT and then as a paramedic, for almost 10 years.
After earning an associate’s degree in nursing from Excelsior University, a distance-learning institution based in Albany, N.Y., he worked at Ascension Borgess in emergency, intensive care and the cath lab for four years.
While at Borgess, Bowers earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Chicago’s Chamberlain University.
After that he and his wife moved to Flint so he could get his master’s degree in anesthesia from the University of Michigan at Flint. He returned to this area after graduating in 2016.
In addition to enjoying spending his free time with his family, Bowers is an avid reader and also assembles and paints miniatures for his tabletop Warhammer 40K game.
Bowers, whose mother, two brothers and families still live in the Parchment area, says his teachers in Parchment helped him learn lessons on life.
“More than any particular lessons on a specific subject, I appreciate those teachers who taught me lessons about life beyond the classroom and helped me find ways to thrive,” he says. “I will say that I still use Mrs. B’s (Carol Bouabdellaoui) Spanish class education to help understand some of my patients.”
