In February, students in the University of Missouri–St. Louis College of Nursing received an email telling them that their next clinical would be at a vaccination clinic at BJC HealthCare’s Christian Hospital. (During the pandemic, clinicals have been some of the only times that UMSL nursing students gather in person; most lectures are given over Zoom, and classwork is often completed online.) Like her peers, 25-year-old Janssen Blackmon anticipated that the day would include a seminar and an opportunity to shadow nurses from health care networks across the area as they vaccinated eligible St. Louisans. But soon after they arrived, a supervisor approached the group to announce: “You’re going to be administering the vaccines today.”
There wasn’t much time to process their new role, but the aspiring nurses knew what to do. After leaders reviewed the procedure, the students began administering Pfizer–BioNTech’s vaccine. “I was anxious, excited, everything at once,” recalls Blackmon, who will graduate this month after finishing her senior synthesis clinical at Missouri Baptist Medical Center.
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Blackmon remembers the first patient of the day, who rejoiced at being the first in the family to receive the vaccine. She explained the pertinent information, including the possibility of inflammation at the injection site, and helped the patient schedule an appointment to receive the second dose. Soon she got into a rhythm. After receiving his injection, her last patient of the day thanked her. “You are a hero,” he said. His gratitude reminded her of why she’d dreamed of pursuing nursing when she was a child: “I thought, Oh, my God. This is how I wanted to make people feel.”
The title of “hero” has been hard to accept for Mandi Tuhro, a nurse in the intensive care unit at MoBap. “This year has been me saying, ‘I can’t have someone or something need me any more than they already do,’” she says, “but then that person or something needs me more, and I just do it.”
In November 2019, a pregnant Tuhro earned a master of science degree in nursing. She planned to spend her maternity leave looking for a family nurse practitioner position, but just months into 2020, everything changed when the region began seeing COVID-19 cases. By the time St. Louis started shutting down to prevent the spread of the virus, Tuhro and her husband were facing parenthood at home, on their own, with rare forays out into the world for necessities and family members only seeing the newborn from a distance.
When maternity leave ended, Tuhro resumed work as an ICU nurse, but now she dressed in a plastic gown, an N95 respirator, and a face shield. She fielded questions from others about whether she feared bringing the virus home to the baby. At the height of the pandemic in St. Louis, the ICU was filled with COVID-19 patients and death. Tuhro spent hours making calls to patients’ family members, who couldn’t visit the hospital, and asking colleagues to care for patients long enough for her to pump breast milk. “I feel like I will remember this as the hardest time of my life,” Tuhro says, recalling the silent car rides to and from work, during which she pumped in the dark, as her only moments of solace.
Read Tuhro’s in-depth interview here.
Solace for Lynne Crader, an ICU nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital for more than 35 years, has come from her daughter, a nurse in the ICU at General Leonard Wood Army Community Hospital, at Fort Leonard Wood. Crader and her colleagues have also felt the support of the community, which has donated items to the frontline workers, from food from local restaurants to self-care goodies such as lotion. “We have also gotten letters and cards from the families of people who didn’t survive,” she says, “looking to connect with us.”
Over the years, Crader has seen the industry change in ways big and small, from the technology nurses use to how they document patients’ vitals. During the pandemic, change has been even more dramatic. Hard lessons were learned through trial and error in real-time: COVID-19 patients require a higher level of care. Teams of six—garbed in medical gowns, N95 respirators, face shields, and hair covers—“proned” patients on their stomachs in an attempt to ease respiratory distress. By the end of each day, they were drenched in sweat. “It’s gotten a lot easier, and a lot of it is just that we have learned how to handle it,” Crader says.
The three women share a cautious optimism as summer approaches. Juggling motherhood and career gets a little easier for Tuhro each day, and she’s comforted by the knowledge that the road to herd immunity will bring her closer to sharing her first child with her family.
Another recent vaccine clinic gave Blackmon the opportunity to vaccinate patients alongside her aunt, Adrienne Greenlee, a longtime nurse at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. It was a moment of hope after Blackmon’s grandfather, her aunt’s father, died of COVID-19 late last year—and, as Blackmon starts her career, the beginning of a deeper bond between niece and aunt.
For Crader, retirement is on the horizon, and even closer is a trip to Myrtle Beach with her 13-year-old triplet granddaughters. “There’s been a lot of strain, but there’s been a lot of good things, too,” she says. “I look forward to vacations, but the job is my life.”
