Personal protective gear a blessing and a curse
Shannon McGregor-Brown, 43
• Critical-care registered nurse • In job 11 years • Married with a five-year-old son
The personal protective equipment that every critical-care nurse depends on for safety is one of the most frustrating aspects of dealing with the pandemic, says Shannon McGregor-Brown.
“I think that’s probably the most stressful part, sometimes, is not being able to get to your patient in the time that you want to solve the problem that you know you can solve.”
Care providers can track their patients’ vital signs from a central monitor at the main desk in the intensive care unit and via patients’ bedside monitors that can be seen through glass walls and doors. They can see whether blood pressure is dropping, or if sedation medication is running low or ventilator requirements change.
But before they can get to a patient, they have to stop and put on protective equipment.
It’s both a blessing and a curse to those in emergency and critical care, especially with COVID-19 patients, because of how rapidly they get sick, said McGregorBrown. “They come in and we intubate them if their oxygen requirements are tipping and then we ventilate them, and sometimes it just cascades so quickly.”
They might need a renal-dialysis machine to filter their blood of toxins. Antibodies can cause an inflammatory response and there is a possibility of blood clots. There can also be cardiac issues.
“So there’s all these physiological changes that can happen over a period of time — sometimes it’s a few hours and sometimes it’s over the course of days — and some days you think they’re getting better and then they take another turn.
“Suddenly their pressure is dropping and … you’re trying to maybe run dialysis and make sure that their kidneys are going to pull through in the end of this … You can’t keep their blood pressure up — it’s a cascade of events.”
Not knowing how this virus is going to respond in any one person’s body is the thing that keeps her up at night.
“It’s a crapshoot,” she says. In March, McGregor-Brown had to call a family in Saskatchewan and suggest they drive out to see a patient immediately. “This person was declining rapidly and it broke my heart. They’re saying to me: ‘I don’t know when I come there, am I coming to see my brother alive and to say hello, or am I coming there to collect his body and take him away?”
McGregor-Brown didn’t know, either. “We take things literally hour by hour, if not minute by minute, when they’re critically ill here, and you just try to support that family to the utmost.”
McGregor-Brown’s husband, Michael Brown, who works in finance, is working at home during the quarantine. She considered self-isolating, but couldn’t bear two or more months away from her five-year-old son. She exercises extreme caution about hygiene.
She likens COVID-19 to a monster in a dark room. “[At first] we hadn’t turned the lights on yet to see what the monster is, but now that we’ve seen it and worked with it, I feel more confident when I go home.”