Oakland Grove residents, staff inoculated with Pfizer vaccine
‘Light at the end of the tunnel’
WOONSOCKET — Pauline Connor, 84, is an active resident of the Oakland Grove Health Care Center at 560 Cumberland Hill Road, and as a result, she was looking forward to getting her COVID-19 vaccination when the shots finally arrived for the center’s residents and staff on Thursday.
“I’m not afraid, not at all,” Connor said as she waited to get her vaccination from a CVS Health employee Thursday afternoon with a fellow resident, Roger Dugas, 81.
Connor, a widow, likes to go room-to-room socializing with her fellow residents to help cheer them up and saw the vaccination as allowing her to get back to normal.
Her bright personality was apparent, as she told a reporter stopping by that she had once been a Call carrier in her youth growing up on Wood Avenue and handled a paper route, as her whole family had done.
A former sister with the Religious of Jesus & Mary before she married and started a family, Connor taught at the former Holy Family School during her 40-year career as a teacher, she noted.
Dugas, 81, was also looking to his vaccination as a way to get back to his normal routines.
“It’s been a little rough, it’s been almost a year,” Dugas said of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic.
It used to be that he could go out once in awhile and enjoy a meal in a restaurant, but that hasn’t happened during the crisis, he noted.
“I like the Texas Roadhouse,” Dugas said, naming the restaurant as his choice for his next meal out when the vaccination takes hold.
Catherine Rasco, Oakland
Grove’s director of social services, said Thursday was the first day vaccinations were administered at the health center and she was excited the day had arrived.
“This is the first day and then they come back in three weeks,” Rasco said of the plan to have the health center’s
residents and staff administered two doses of the Pfizer vaccine under the partnership with CVS. The vaccine shots are given three weeks apart in order to achieve the full level of protection they provide against COVID-19.
“We need to take steps to get back to normalcy and to get our families back into this building and today, I think, is the way to start doing that,” Rasco said of the vaccination program.
About 57 Oakland Grove staff members and 73 residents were to get vaccinated on Thursday, Rasco noted.
The Center has 126 residents in all, but not all are eligible to receive the vaccine due to health conditions or allergy concerns, she noted.
Anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19 would be excluded and the resident or their families could also decide to not have it administered, according to Rasco.
Since the pandemic began, Oakland Grove has dealt with a number of cases of COVID-19 and continues to operate a separate COVID-19 ward on the fourth floor for patients recovering from the illness.
Rasco said she found out she had COVID-19 recently as a result of the Center’s regular testing program and ended up quarantining for three weeks while she recovered from symptoms ranging from a headache to shortness of breath.
“I did alright with it,” Rasco said, noting she was able to fully recover and return to work.
COVID-19 testing is conducted at the Center twice a week as a way to limit the spread of virus, Rasco noted.
Robert Sechio, who took over as Oakland Grove’s administrator in December, said Oakland Grove – like many other nursing centers in the state – has been fighting COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic.
“What this does today is give us a little light at the end of the tunnel,” Sechio said.
In addition to stopping COVID-19 from spreading between residents and staff in the center, Sechio noted the vaccinations will also help speed up its efforts to restore family visitations, an important form of personal interaction for residents of the facility.
Patients on the lower floors of the Center are eligible for family visitations, but those are currently operated by having the patient stay inside a first floor room while the family members talk with them from outside via a glass window, according to Sechio. Eventually, in-person visitation will be available as the state’s vaccination program continues through its phases, according to Sechio.
For patients coming in with COVID-19, mostly recovery cases from hospitals such as nearby Landmark Medical Center, Sechio said the goal is to get them out of the COVID-19 ward within 10 days and get them on a regular floor.
“We notify families that we will get your relative downstairs as soon as we can,” Sechio noted.
In addition to the patients such as Connor and Dugas, Oakland Grove staff members were also getting their shots on Thursday. Sechio said he was one of them.
“I did; I couldn’t wait,” Sechio said of receiving the vaccination. “I got it this morning but I had to wait because so many of our staff were in line.”
Woonsocket Public Safety Director Eugene Jalette stopped by to check out the vaccination program Thursday afternoon.
The city’s emergency responders have been getting their vaccinations through the Smithfield vaccination location the state set up for that purpose and Jalette said it was good to see the program starting in local nursing homes as well.
“Everybody has been skeptical about the vaccine initially, but I think you have to follow the science and the science is telling us to take the vaccine,” Jalette said. “So I think everybody should.”