Joseph and Vincent Bartolucci

Identical Twins Double Down on the Passion They Bring to Nursing

Joseph and Vincent Bartolucci say they’ve always enjoyed intentionally confusing people and assuming each other’s identity — starting in kindergarten.

Let’s call it an identical-twins thing.

“It was really fun, especially with our mom — I used to answer to ‘Vincent’ all the time,” Joe said. “She would always confuse us, whether it was calling for us across the house or seeing us in the room.”

And their mother, Michele, who they say possesses a healthy sense of humor, was never shy about joining in on the fun, to the point of using her eyeliner to draw a freckle on Joe’s right cheek to match the one on Vin’s, in an effort to further confuse their teachers and classmates. She would also dress them in identical outfits, making it still harder to tell them apart.

A penchant for fun is not the only thing the Bartolucci twins took from their mother. Another is a passion for helping others and, more specifically, the nursing profession.

Indeed, Michele Bartolucci has been a nurse at Mercy Medical Center in Springfield for more than 30 years, working in intermediate care and endoscopy, where she is now nurse manager.

“That’s her passion … she just loves the field; she just loves helping people,” Vin said. “She would always come home with stories, talking about how she would help her patients that day and how it made her feel. She had hard days, too, but she would always express that she just loved helping people.”

This sentiment rubbed off on the twins, who recently graduated from the nursing program at Holyoke Community College (HCC), where they were in most classes together and where they greatly confounded fellow students, professors, advisers, and even the photographer at commencement, who thought they were the same person.

“My mom would be working with the patients, and I saw how passionate she was and how awesome a nurse she was, and that was the moment when I said, ‘I can do this; I want to do this.”

And they are now both working at Baystate Medical Center as apprentice nurses, on separate units, which will certainly help both patients and co-workers, because these two are pretty much indistinguishable except for slightly different hairstyles, Vin’s freckle, and the different earring preferences. They even sound alike.

At Baystate, they are building on a family tradition of work in healthcare — their stepfather, Brett Hayes, is also a nurse at Mercy, and their sister, Lexie, who majored in public health at UMass Amherst, will be pursuing a nursing degree at HCC in the fall.

“I think maybe we influenced her,” said Vin, who, like Joe, recalls his mother taking the twins to work with her when she was on call — because she had no one to leave them with — and being inspired by what he saw and heard.

The Bartolucci brothers at their recent graduation at HCC.

“We would sit in the recovery room,” he said. “My mom would be working with the patients, and I saw how passionate she was and how awesome a nurse she was, and that was the moment when I said, ‘I can do this; I want to do this.’”

Joe, who tells a similar story, said he started at Baystate, again as an apprentice, on a neurology unit.

“It was a challenging unit; it was a heavy unit, really sick patients with declines, lots of rapid responses and code blues on that floor,” he said, adding that he will soon move to a med-surg/telemetry unit at Baystate Medical Center.

As for Vin, he started as a patient care technician on a med-surg unit last August and is now a nurse apprentice on that floor. And, like his brother, mother, and stepfather, he enjoys all aspects of this work.

“The best thing is being the person that improves someone’s day or makes a person’s day better,” he explained. “A lot of the people that I see don’t really want to be in the hospital, so to make someone’s day a little better is the best feeling. And just to see someone smile or say ‘thank you’ is a really good feeling, and it makes you want to work harder.”

Joe concurred. “It’s a rewarding job, and it’s great to be able to make a difference in someone’s day,” he said, “even if that difference is making them feel a little cleaner or just talking with them and hearing about their concerns.”

Meanwhile, having a brother that he’s still living with, who’s also just starting his career and going through the same experiences, is a unique benefit, he went on.

“It’s really good to have someone to bounce things off,” Joe said. “Whether I have a good day or a bad day, I have someone to go to at the end of the shift and talk to about things.”

Joe and Vin don’t sound like they’re done having fun confusing people and assuming each other’s identity. But right now, they have more important things to do — like getting entrenched in careers they knew they were destined for while sitting in that recovery room on those days their mother was on call.

When it comes to bringing the requisite passion to their work, they’re doubling down — in all kinds of ways.