A Vmiethwe fro s e n i l t Fron BEFORE COVID HAPPENED,
I worked on the telemetry (a.k.a. cardiac) floor. I
loved that job, but my floor was going to be transitioning into something new, so we closed down. I was floating around the hospital, so I started going to the COVID floor because it’s staffed on a volunteer basis, and there are a lot of nurses who don’t want to go down there. The patients are of a wide variety of ages. I worked with one patient who was as young as me, and it was eye-opening. It was such a meaningful experience, both for him and for me. He said, “Thank you so much for being here, you’re making a difference.” I also had another experience where a patient told me, “You’re not scared to be around me,” and that really broke my heart. Of course, the patients have this virus, and we’re still learning so much about it and discovering treatments, but these are still human beings. I want to make sure that they’re still shown all the love and attention and care they deserve. This is already an emotional job because there’s energy being shared between a patient and me, and I’m Alumna and registered nurse Kiera Simon ’09 took advantage of a program that often flies under the radar at Mills: pre-nursing. After two years at Mills, she moved on to complete her nursing degree at Samuel Merritt University. And now, she finds herself on the frontlines with COVID-19. Simon, who works at a Dignity Health facility in a suburb of Sacramento— volunteered to staff her hospital’s dedicated floor for coronavirus patients starting in April. In mid-July, she spoke with the Quarterly about her ongoing experiences as a healthcare worker in a pandemic, just as case numbers were spiking to dangerous levels in her area.
so open to whatever they need from me, but now it’s really emotional because there’s no other human contact. There’s no visitation—families are connected through FaceTime, etc.—so I’m one of the only people who a patient sees and gets to visit with. It’s really refreshed my nursing experience, in a sense. This is why we do what we do. We all say on the COVID unit that this is hard work, but it’s so rewarding. When I’m talking with patients who are positive, I’m constantly asking, “Where do you work?” There were a couple patients who worked at restaurants, one who worked for a local prison, others who were at nursing homes. There’s still so much to learn about viral load and how it spreads, people who are asymptomatic versus symptomatic—but as a bedside nurse, I have taken care of patients who are struggling on oxygen at 28 years old and at 83 years old. There are 15 beds on the COVID floor where I work, and each patient usually has their own room, but yesterday, we started “cohorting” patients, which is putting two patients in one room. We’re figuring out how we can handle more numbers in the same space. I work at a hospital that’s taking a lead on COVID in the Sacramento area, so we get a lot of transfers. We were even getting people from Southern California at one point. But given our surge plan, I think they had to stop doing that. There’s a certain number we reach where we can’t take any more from outside facilities because we have to be able to service the people in this community. We are definitely getting up there, that’s for sure.
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M I L L S Q U A R T E R LY
