“You wanna save a life with me tonight?”

By Maureen Gilmer, Riley Children’s Health senior writer, mgilmer1@iuhealth.org

Dianne Seibold can still hear the surgeon’s voice on the other end of the phone.

“Dianne, you wanna save a life with me tonight?”

Her response was always the same. “Absolutely.”

Didn’t matter if it was 10 o’clock in the evening or 2 in the morning. She was ready to go.

“To be a part of that, knowing you made a difference like that, there’s no career I would ever want other than what I’ve done.”

As an operating room nurse at Riley Hospital for Children for four decades, most of that time with the neurosurgery team, Seibold has been a part of saving many lives. She has touched countless more with her positive attitude, her dedication and her love for Riley.

She is retiring April 2 after a 43-year career, the last few years spent in a clinical education coordinator role training OR nurses.

Leaving now feels right, she said, even though she gets emotional talking about it as she walks through the halls of Riley, still impressed with the growth she has witnessed over the years.

Seibold, a certified scuba diver who also has a black belt in karate, has grandbabies to spoil, mission trips in Africa to continue and a new chapter of life to live.

But Riley will always have her heart, she said.

Although she knew from the age of 5 that she wanted to be a nurse, pediatric nursing was not her goal. Too painful, she said. She figured adults were more her speed.

But after a year of working on a surgical floor at what is now IU Health University Hospital, a position as an operating room nurse at Riley came open. The OR was where she longed to be, so she took a leap of faith.

“I came here and thought, ‘This is home.’ I knew from the day I started here.”

No doubt she would have had an impact wherever she worked, but her colleagues at Riley are grateful she landed where she did.

“Always knew what to do, persistently positively, one of my best friends, irreplaceable.”

That’s how Dr. Laurie Ackerman describes Seibold, who steered the neurosurgery nursing ship in the OR for decades. Dr. Ackerman was a neurosurgery fellow when the two met, and their careers were inextricably linked.

The two remain close today. In fact, Dr. Ackerman hosted a party for Seibold recently, attended by past and present Riley neurosurgeons and other friends and team members.

“She’s always had a wonderful way of nudging people along without them realizing she was guiding them down the right path when something wasn’t going well,” said the neurosurgeon.

“She’s a person you’d like to clone and have a team of every day.”

Seibold has done everything she can to prepare the OR nursing team for her departure, taking the reins of onboarding and training cohorts of new nurses over the past few years.

Katy Morris will slide into Seibold’s role going forward.

“She’s going to be great,” Seibold said.

Kirsten Reid, nursing professional development practitioner, was in the first cohort of nurses whom Seibold onboarded in her new role. She has since joined her mentor and friend in an educator role, ensuring Riley has a full team of OR nurses, with more in the pipeline.

Coming out of COVID, things were not easy, Reid recalled.

“Dianne got our boat through the storm.”

She did that by continuously moving forward.

“She has this ability to take a deep breath and keep going. We had so many traveling nurses, so many people coming and going, it was easy to just get fatigued,” Reid said, describing the challenges in healthcare during that time.

“But she just kept going, and now we are fully staffed. We went from having 30 travelers to having none, and that is absolutely because of her.”

Seibold is not one for the spotlight, but she is proud of what she and her team have accomplished. She feels like a “mom” to many of the younger nurses, and yes, she is known to be kind and encouraging, with an uncanny ability to care for people professionally and personally, Reid said.

But she also challenges her colleagues to be their best. She never relaxed her standards in the OR.

“She will do whatever she needs to do to make sure the patient gets the best care,” Reid said.

That’s what Dr. Mark Cain, chief of pediatric urology at Riley, remembers about his years of working with Seibold.

“She represents the Riley institutional wisdom and care that make us the place we are,” he said.

While she spent the bulk of her career assisting in neurosurgeries, in the early days, nurses rotated through different service lines.

“I remember once when she was scrubbing in with me, and she looked me right in the eye and said, ‘You know, I don’t know if I remember how to do this, but we’re going to do this together.’ It was that can-do attitude, the feeling of working together. And her eyes just twinkled behind her mask,” he said.

“She has a way of letting people know she’s there for you. She was always interested in the operations I did and wanted to know what I needed before I needed it. Just an unbelievable attention to detail.”

That’s a requirement for a surgical nurse, Seibold said, in addition to being a good team player, being a strong advocate for the patient, being a bit of an adrenaline junkie and being good with change and technology.

“I’ve had the privilege of watching the advancement of medicine,” Seibold said. “That’s what’s so amazing about being part of an academic health center because you’re constantly doing new things, bringing in new programs, doing research, all for the good of the child.”

Unlike her husband, Steve, who is also retiring (the couple have three children and seven grandchildren), she has some mixed feelings about leaving her career after so long in the same place.

“It will be hard,” she said. “I’m not leaving because I’m tired, but it’s time.”

She is leaving Riley better for her time here, her friends and colleagues say.

“One of the best we’ve ever had at Riley,” said pediatric surgeon Dr. Fred Rescorla, describing her as the “go-to person” for most of her career.

“She was beloved by the neurosurgeons,” he said. “It seemed they were only happy if she was around. They had complete confidence in her.”

Her presence in the operating rooms at Riley will be felt for decades to come, as new nurses trained by her follow in her footsteps.

Dr. Cain is a firm believer that a person’s leadership success is defined by how well the organization performs without that person.

If it does well, he said, “that means you’ve led correctly and you replaced yourself before you left. You can’t replace 40 years of wisdom, but you can replace a style and thoroughness of training, and she’ll surely do that.”

In addition, he said, “She waves the Riley flag in a proud way, which is really heartwarming.”

That won’t change, even as she leaves the hospital, Seibold said.

“I’m very blessed to have had the career I’ve had. When you tell someone you work at Riley, they’re like, that’s so cool, and it is. Nobody will ever be able to take that from me. This is my home. It’s where my heart is.”

Her heart might be a bit heavy next week, but she is grateful for the journey and the people she’s met along the way.

“When you find your dream, go for it,” she said. “Before you blink your eyes, it will be done. What a blessing I’ve had.”

Photos submitted and by Mike Dickbernd, IU Health visual journalist, mdickbernd@iuhealth.org