‘Steady, professional, courageous’: A look at the life of a nurse in the COVID fight

‘We’re looking for nurses, particularly nurses at this time, during an event like this,’ St. Tammany Health System Chief Nursing Officer Kerry Milton said during a recent interview on The Lake 94.7. ‘We’re still hiring for registered nurses that have experience.’ (Photo by Tim San Fillippo/STHS)

By Mike Scott, mscott@stph.org

Thirty-eight days into St. Tammany Health System’s COVID-19 response, many of the tools being used by nurses in the front-line fight against the novel coronavirus will by now sound familiar to many people: face shields, ventilators, N95 masks.

But, as STHS Chief Nursing Officer Kerry Milton explained during a recent guest spot on The Lake 94.7 FM, some unexpected tools have been pressed into service along the way at the Covington hospital.

For example: There are the dry-erase markers some nurses are using to play tic-tac-toe with COVID patients on the glass doors of their rooms, just to help them break up the boredom of life in isolation.

There have been the laminated photographs some hospital caregivers have taped to their gowns, to remind patients that there’s a human being beneath all that personal protective equipment.

There has been the sidewalk chalk that “chalk fairies” have used to write motivational messages on pathways leading to the hospital, to remind front-line caregivers they’re very much appreciated.

There has been the hospital’s new “Recharge Room” and its “Almost Home” room to help make sure caregivers are remembering to care for themselves.

The list goes on.

Below, read an edited transcript of Milton’s discussion with Charles Dowdy of The Lake, in which she pulls back the curtain and offers a glimpse at the life of a nurse during this particularly challenging time.

So, how are things going there at the hospital?

We are doing well. I would call it steady, professional, courageous. We have had a lot of nurses who have become experts in the field of donning and doffing protective equipment and taking care of some of our sickest patients during this pandemic.

Have there been any surprises along the way? Things you didn’t expect?

I think so. The fact that the patients that we are caring for are in isolation, and they’ve been in isolation for quite a long period of time, it’s a very lonely kind of existence when your caregivers are all dressed up in suits. You can’t see their faces, you can barely hear their voices. I think we didn’t expect the isolation that patients would be facing and some of the things we’d have to do to combat that to allow the patient to continue to improve.

So, we are changing the way we’re doing things when it comes to patient care. We’re laminating pictures of ourselves and affixing that to our gowns. We’re talking, playing games, singing with the patients, (playing) tic-tac-toe on the window. Just a lot of real innovative things for those patients in significant isolation for long periods of time.

How are the hospital’s caregivers holding up?

It’s difficult. It’s long hours. It’s wearing a lot of gear. It’s hot. It’s tiring, and I think the fear that people have of taking the virus home to their family at the end of a long shift is ever-present, so we’ve created some recharging environments where staff during the course of their long shift can go down to this recharge area, relax, get a bottle of water, have a snack, listen to some nice music, look at some video screens of outdoors before they, 10 minutes later, go back and do it all over again.

In addition, we’ve created an “Almost Home” room, an environment where you can wash, change clothes, decompress and feel clean prior to leaving the hospital to go home to your family.

Recently, there was a case where local law enforcement officers showed their support for healthcare workers at the hospital. Talk about what that that kind of display of community support means for the people at STHS.

That particular incident that you’re talking about occurred a couple of times, where law enforcement came to the hospital (and) stood outside as our staff were arriving for work and in some cases leaving.

And on another occasion they did the same thing, lining the areas outside the hospital and turning on their lights and just standing outside their vehicles clapping, just suggesting their support for the folks inside the building working.

(It’s a) huge motivator for people, particularly nurses.

We’ve also had numerous volunteers go out and do what we call “chalk art,” where the sidewalks that you walk on toward the hospital as you’re getting to work have been decorated with “Heroes work here,” “We love and support you,” “Thanks for your compassion and skill and for everything you do” – motivational types of comments as folks are arriving to work. And it’s just a giant pick-me-up when you know either what’s approaching you and facing you throughout the day or, in fact, makes you feel good after you’ve completed a shift as well.

One of the challenges has to be that you’re doing this behind closed doors. It has to be different in terms of how isolated the hospital is.

The environment that you would see here is every patient, visitor or staff member that enters the hospital is screened. We screen by taking your temperature, asking you questions about whether you have any symptoms -- nausea or temperature or GI upset, etc. -- prior to even coming into the building.

You don a mask, so when you’re inside the environment, everybody in the building is wearing a mask. When you arrive on the floor, you’ll see a lot of extra equipment in the hallways and a lot of people wearing gowns, gloves and masks.

The hospital is oriented for COVID purposes to the critical care areas, of which we have three. Those critical care areas are highly technical -- a lot of equipment, a lot of sounds, a lot of beeping, where people are wearing a lot of protective equipment, where the patients you hear about on ventilators are. That’s where we take care of the sickest of the sick patients.

And then there are other parts of the hospital that we call more medical COVID units, where patients not requiring ventilation are staying. These are all private rooms. The nurses are caring for these individual patients still with all the protective equipment on. Those are the isolated patients we’re talking about. Though they’re not ventilated and they’re not sedated, they’re just isolated in their rooms, receiving care from our nurses. There are three of those units.

Then we also have regular patients that still require hospitalization who are on a separate unit -- again, taking care of patients in a more normal way.

Sounds like a busy building.

It is, it is. And, by the way, people are still having babies in yet another part of the building.

As far as the nursing profession, do you need more nurses?

We are always looking for additional nurses to enter our profession. In fact, we have a very active residency program for new graduates and we hire new graduates three times a year to come and be trained at St. Tammany.

But we’re looking for nurses, particularly nurses at this time, during an event like this. We’re still hiring for registered nurses that have experience.

St. Tammany is a great place to work, a great environment, so anybody out there that’s still looking, we are hiring at St. Tammany.

Get all the latest information on COVID-19 in our community at STHS.org/COVID-19.