From the Frontlines: Emergency nurse faces daily battle with COVID-19
Lacey Ward is a registered nurse in the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Adult Emergency Department.
Courtesy of Lacey Ward
What were your expectations of what your chosen career would be like when you became a nurse?
I think that my expectations have changed over time. Upon graduation I expected it to be a cheerful job, being helpful, and very much a controlled environment. I started my career out on a med-surg floor and that initial expectation that I had was mostly the reality. A year into my career, I switched to emergency medicine. Nobody is having good day when they come to the ER. It is fast, chaotic, intense and amazing. You feel like you are actively saving lives, and getting to be a part of that is beyond words. Once you fall in love with emergency medicine, no other area of medicine will be enough.
How has that perception changed over time, especially during the pandemic?
The pandemic has changed my perception multiple times. In the beginning of the pandemic, it was scary and unknown, but there was a sense of community in the world. Everyone was staying in and supporting health care workers, and we did not really have a large wave of patients until this summer. We were waiting for the storm.
In June-August, the storm really hit. It became an everyday reminder of “Do I have my mask? Do I have my shield? Do I have extra scrubs? Have I eaten today?” It was a blur of adrenaline and stress that you carried with you all day, every day. Did I really make the right choice going into this field?
You must stop now and ask if this patient is a possible COVID patient, and do I need to put gear on, etc. It is not necessarily the illness that makes you question if you made the right choice, but just the simple fact of how much harder your job became just to simply take care of someone. Like Dr. LouAnn Woodward stated the other day, it is a feeling of surrealness to be in that environment and then leave and see people out in the community behaving like none of this is happening. How can you ignore this, you want to ask. How has this not completely devastated your life?
Then you realize no one has experienced what you have through those doors. They do not know or do not believe in the severity of the virus, or even the virus itself. The patients that have had this illness will tell you, though. Listen to them. Listen to how some wished they would die but did not, or how isolating it is to be alone in the hospital.
Courtesy of Lacey Ward
What was a typical day like for you before the pandemic?
A typical day at work was running from patient to patient doing whatever we needed to treat and get them to the appropriate area for further care. My days off were spent doing fun things with my kids and my husband.
What has it been like for you during the pandemic?
It has been a challenge. Not only are you going through the pandemic at work, but it has also affected families and jobs outside of the health care system. My husband and I both worked continuously through everything - shutdowns, schools out for six months, etc. My husband is in law enforcement. We have spent our off time at home trying to still enjoy fun things at the house with the kids. We try to not bring the stress home. It has been hard to find balance.
What has been the hardest part of being an ER nurse during this time?
The hardest part, believe it or not, is the inability to effectively treat the patients. This was especially the situation when the numbers were so elevated, and we had mostly critical patients. When you are learning about a novel virus and there are no cures, no vaccines, no known treatment, the hardest position is not being able to “fix” our patients. ER nursing is an area of “I want immediate gratification and to fix the problem.” If your heart is not beating, we will restart it. If you are having a stroke, we will give you medicine to fix it. If you have a gunshot wound, we will stabilize you and get you to surgery.
When it comes to this virus, especially in the beginning, we had nothing. We could hope to lessen the symptoms, but we could only do so much. It is awful to feel like you are helpless when you are supposed to be the helper.
You talked about the feeling of being defeated, yet you keep doing your job. Where do you draw the strength to keep going?
What choice do I really have? It is not an option to give up on my patients, my coworkers, my community. My boys give me the strength to keep trying to make it better for everyone. More and more nurses are retiring early or even getting out of nursing altogether during this pandemic. We need nurses now more than ever.
How do you balance your personal fears of bringing COVID home to your kids with fulfilling your professional mission of caring for the virus’ victims?
It scares me. In my opinion, all health care workers fear bringing the virus home to our families. It gives me some security to know that I wear my PPE and clean constantly. My kids have a much higher chance of picking it up at school or my husband bringing it home than me, honestly, because our facility has done such a targeted job of decreasing our risk.
UMMC has made sure we have the PPE to do our job. They developed our own viral media to have widespread testing available to the community, and we get tested if we are symptomatic or if we have family contacts. We have special filters in almost every room of our Emergency Department to filter out COVID droplets in the air.
I try to take solace in the support of my coworkers and supervisors that we will weather this time together.
If there is one message you could share with the public, what would that message be?
You have heard it before, but: Wear a mask. I cannot stress that enough. It is tiresome to always wear a mask and stay at home, but it is worth it if we can decrease these numbers.
People need to work, and kids need to go to school, and the only way we can continue with that is doing what we need to do to bring the numbers down. In times of great uncertainty and strife, our country has always had a sense of community and pulled together with pride. We need to become that again.
We have an obligation to our grandparents, friends, and children to do everything we possibly can to keep them safe. The health care system cannot do it alone. We need everyone.
“Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success.” - Henry Ford.
Let us succeed.
From the Frontlines is an ongoing series from the Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting which interviews health care professionals on the frontlines of the pandemic.
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