After variety of jobs, woman on road to graduation at Autry

ENID, Okla. (AP) - Suzanne Smith is a Jill of all trades.

Smith is on track to graduate from Autry Technology Center after finishing the Surgery Technology program in July, but her road to Enid was nontraditional.

In 1997, Smith opened a cafe and bar in Key Largo, Fla., but it wasn’t what she thought it would be.

“We had that less than a year because we found out that owning a bar in Key Largo was not all it was made out to be,” she said. The nice homes in the Keys that people see in movies are all summer homes, she said.

“The locals don’t have a whole lot,” she said. “I didn’t really do my research before I bought that bar. It was a spur-of-the-moment-type thing. I learned my lesson.”

She stayed in Florida after closing the restaurant and joined a scuba-diving documentary team and worked for two years making a film about preserving the coral reef.

“I was on an underwater film crew,” she said. “We had to gear up and put all our stuff on the (ocean) floor and conduct business like usual, but we had all our gear on with our waterproof markers and signs and everything.

“If we wanted to ask a question to the rest of the team, we would write it down on the board. It was fun.”

After a marriage and opening a cosmetics boutique in Florida in 2009, Smith and her identical twin sister were both going through divorces and decided they needed to do something different.

“We didn’t have kids of our own, and we thought, ’What’s something wild and crazy we can do and make money at the same time?’” she said. “We loved to travel, so we decided to drive 18-wheelers, as weird as that is.

“We were very good at it. It was hard, but it was fun.”

The twins drove from coast to coast, delivering Hershey’s chocolates and Coors beer, but it wasn’t all sunshine and flowers all the time, the Enid News & Eagle (https://bit.ly/1Ji5H4p ) reports.

“The weather is about as crazy as it gets,” she said. “You drive over the Rocky Mountains in the middle of a blizzard with ice- and snow-covered mountains, and going over that in an 18-wheeler is not something I would want to do again. You make one little mistake and you’re off the mountain, quick.”

The sisters lived in the truck, but they still like each other after all that.

“If you had asked me during that time, I would have said something different,” she laughed. “Two girls, yeah, it wasn’t all good times. Lots of fights.

“But she is my best friend. We are still crazy about each other.”

After her stint driving 18-wheelers, Smith met her husband, a lineman in the oil field, and they came to Enid.

“I was out here and needed a good job where I can move anywhere and get, on the probability that we might be moving someplace else,” she said.

So she drove past Autry one day and decided to stop to see what the technology center offered.

“I had never heard of surgery tech,” she said. “I had seen it in movies and stuff, people standing around the table, but for all I knew, they were all doctors performing the procedure.”

Going to school for a year to do something so technical seemed disproportionate, but she stuck with it.

“I didn’t know you could come to school for a year and have your hands in the midst of that stuff,” she said. “It’s serious business, and something I didn’t think I would ever do. I’m jumping out of my comfort zone a little bit.

“The more I thought about it, the more interesting it sounded, and I was up for a challenge.”

A year later, Smith still is loving her career track, and plans to work in labor and delivery.

“What I love about surgery technology is that on any given day, you can be doing anything from open-heart surgery to C-sections.”

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Information from: Enid News & Eagle, https://www.enidnews.com