In the Eyes of a Nurse: The COVID-19 Pandemic
By Yasmin Mam and Jennifer Castaneda
With the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic fluctuating with cases nurses continue to fight on the frontlines risking their safety and health for the community.
COVID-19 continues to impact nurses and the normalcy of their workplace. Amidst the beginning of the pandemic when COVID-19 cases were on the rise chaos was brought to Chicago hospitals.
Katherine Arjona, a nurse working at the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System, said while cases were rising, beds were getting filled on the hospital’s COVID-19 floor.
Arjona said the COVID-19 unit grew from the combination of three entirely separate units of the hospital as the virus spread. Many drastic changes were made to adapt to handling the virus such as quick training on how to treat and stay protected from passing the virus on.
“It felt like going to school all over again. We had to learn about it all in one day,” she said.
She also talked about the many difficulties that nurses faced at the beginning of the pandemic such as mask shortages and the fear of transferring the virus from work to loved ones.
“One nurse had caught it and had to go home and she ended up passing it to her husband,” she said. “Unfortunately, he passed away due to it. Another nurse exposed to it also passed. A total of 4 nurses that had been exposed to it passed from it. It’s so sad.”
Ashley Gualberto, a registered nurse in labor and delivery at Northshore Highland Park, said there was a shortage of proper masks at her workplace.
“At the time, we had a shortage of PPE so people had to sorta save their N95 masks,” she said. “We had to reuse our N95 masks for a few days up to a few weeks until we got more proper PPE.”
The professionals were still learning about COVID-19 just as everyone else was during the spring season. In terms of symptoms of the virus and understanding how it spread officials had no idea that the virus was airborne at the beginning of the pandemic putting many nurses in danger as they assisted patients.
“At first they said it’s not airborne,” Arjona said. “They said oh it’s just a droplet precaution. So there was a fight between the use of simple masks versus N-95. So nurses were exposed of course.”
Many nurses became exposed to the virus causing them to quarantine which in effect made other nurses displaced from their units to be sent to the COVID-19 floor.
The nurses that were displaced from their usual duties and tasks and placed into floors that specialized with patients of COVID-19 feared exposure to the virus. Over time as cases grew so did the need for nurses to be moved to COVID-19 related cases.
Additionally, even student nurses were impacted by the coronavirus. Students who were working their way up to nursing also experienced difficulties due to the virus. With all classes transferred onto an online platform, many student nurses worried about their academics and their own personal performance with e-learning.
Nicolette Arjona, Katherine Arjona’s niece is a student nurse at Chamberlain University and she shared her experience with online nursing.
“I do want to go back to school,” she said in reference to in-person classes, “not just because I’m more of a visual learner, but it’s different when you’re physically there learning procedures instead of watching them through the camera Webex”.
Joophil Kim who is a nursing student at Resurrection University expresses his worries as he also interns in hospitals for his nursing program.
“I worry about going out all the time because of this pandemic,” Kim explained. “A lot of people are still not keeping safe and not wearing their masks so all we gotta do is that we’re keeping ourselves safe. Working at the hospitals too, there are COVID-19 patients all the time.”
Schools such as Resurrection University have been putting up stricter guidelines for students in order to ensure health and safety amongst everyone. These regulations often make students like Kim feel better entering the school facility when necessary.
“The new guidelines are that every student or anyone who walks into the building must get screened,” he said. “So they check our temperature, ask us if we have traveled within two weeks, and see if we have any fevers because if we have a fever, then we are not allowed into the building.”
Currently, nurses have more tasks that they have to do in order to limit the amount of exposure with patients who have or may have COVID-19.
Gualberto added, “For some COVID positive patients or patients who are under investigation of COVID, basically, usually they have other resources we can use so if they need blood draw, they can have a phlebotomist come in to draw their blood but if they are COVID positive, they ask the nurses to do basically everything to limit the amount of exposure to other resources such as phlebotomy or housekeeping.”
Temperature screenings and limiting visitors within hospital facilities have been the two main factors in keeping safety amongst patients and staff afloat throughout this pandemic. As well as a COVID-19 survey that each nurse has to frequently fill out.
Gualberto says, “Before you even enter the building, there’s a website on our phone where we have to fill out a survey and show the screener which says that I don’t have any symptoms of COVID and that I haven’t been in contact with anyone that has COVID.”
Although the survey is recommended, it isn’t an obligation since staff will still be asked the same questions but it does save time in terms of screening. Staff members are not allowed in if they answer “yes” to all questions on the survey as well as being screened.
Since there are stricter visitor policies where Gualberto works, the difficulty of these regulations become apparent when it affects patients and emits a negative response.
“I work in a OBGYN office now and like a lot of the dads they can’t even come in with their wives even for their first ultrasound so they can’t even see their baby even for the first time which sucks for a lot of first time moms,” Gualberto said. “They feel like they’re going through it themselves. And we’ve had a lot of pushback from the patients saying things like, ‘Well this is ridiculous! Like I can’t have my husband here? Can’t you make an exception?’”
Gualberto further expresses that in situations like these, exceptions still cannot be made because it wouldn’t be fair to other patients and regulations simply cannot be changed.
However, Jonas Malabunga, a registered nurse in a medical-surgical unit at Northshore Highland Park, further explains the limited exceptions that are made in some hospitals.
“The only way that we could get visitors is if it requires discharged teaching,” he said.
In some cases, when COVID-19 first began some people as Malabunga explains did get laid-off for a short time in his department.
He said, “When COVID started, I worked on the surgical floor, so oftentimes a lot of us got laid off for a bit because there was no surgeries happening but for that month and a half people weren’t working that much.”
With the pandemic still ongoing and the vaccine still in development, nurses continue to fight back with stronger determination. In addition to the knowledge, they have now gained and their quick adaptability nurses continue to save many lives.
“It was a lot. It was very hectic, but in the end, we were able to handle it,” said Katherine Arjona.
