MOTHERS ON THE FRONT LINE
Health care workers pull double duty this Mother’s Day
This is a Mother’s Day unlike any other. Physicians, nurses, aides and paramedics are among those on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. For those workers who are mothers, too, there is a new normal: Going to work, stripping out of scrubs and showering before entering the house to face a whole new set of challenges — being a mom isn’t easy in the best of times.
And yes, they often have help from dads, partners, older children and siblings. But this weekend, we shine a spotlight on some of the moms keeping it together on multiple fronts.
About a week after classes moved online in the Upper St. Clair School District, Dr.
Charissa Pacella’s 10-year-old daughter, Michaela, wrote an email to her teacher.
“My daughter wrote, ‘I feel like we are in the zombie apocalypse and my parents are fighting zombies.’ I thought that was really funny,” Dr. Pacella said.
It is somewhat of an appropriate comparison: Dr. Pacella is chief of emergency medicine for UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Oakland.
With two doctors in the house — her husband, John, is a cardiologist — there was rarely time for a sit-down dinner in the time before pandemic.
“We’ve actually had more family dinners in the past three weeks than in the three months before that,” Dr. Pacella said. With four children — sons Justin, Nick and Gabe are teenagers — suddenly at home with no extracurricular activities, life has settled into a routine that can be, thankfully, a little boring.
“We are so blessed to be in a place where we are not facing the scale of what they are facing in New York or Seattle or New Orleans,” she said.
“I think there was a little more [family] anxiety right when school first got canceled and they realized everyone else was staying home, and their parents went to work.”
When not at the hospital, Dr. Pacella spends hours on Zoom meetings, and she teaches an online course at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
“We [working moms] multitask every day, all the time. So this has just taken that up a level.”
Antonette Murphy-Curington
doesn’t sugarcoat it: “You have the weight of the world on your shoulders sometimes.”
Ms. Murphy is a unit director for traumatic brain and stroke rehabilitation at UPMC Mercy Hospital, Uptown. A “typical” day for this nurse used to be 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Now she and others might arrive 90 minutes earlier or stay later to screen people at the door.
Weekends and evenings might require unprecedented numbers of phone or virtual meetings to discuss care and update protocols. But “this is something I signed
up for. This is my passion, this is my calling, knowing that I’m able to keep patients alive and provide them with compassionate, empathetic care every day,” she said.
Before the COVID-19 crisis, life was hectic enough, with three kids attending schools in three different districts. At work, Ms. Murphy oversees 80 employees and 44 beds.
“It has been quite a challenge with the work-life balance,” she said.
Yet she said spending more time with four children at home has helped ground everyone. Reonna Mullins, 16, Marcus Mullins, 13, De’Asia Austin-Wilson, 14, and Damir Curington, 3, keep their Penn Hills home lively.
“We have found a lot of things to do together. My children were in sports; it was go, go, go [before]. We do board games; TikTok is big. Even if we are just reminiscing, looking over old pictures, sitting at the dinner table together, just spending quality time.”
Ms. Murphy’s husband, Darrick, joined the millions left unemployed once the pandemic began. But he is playing a big role, she said: “He’s helping with the children and the school work, grocery shopping and just being that person when I can’t be there.”
■■■
Marci Youngmark laughed when she said that her Regent Square household contains “two pseudoadults.”
Daughter Rachel works for Allegheny County 911 as a dispatcher, so she is also a first responder. Son Brent recently graduated, sans formal commencement, from Chatham University.
Her husband, Chris, is secretary/treasurer for the United Steelworkers of America, which is how the family came to move to Pittsburgh from New Mexico a year ago.
As nurse manager for both the COVID-19 and burn cardiothoracic units at AHN West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield, Ms. Youngmark wears many hats in addition to masks.
“I joke that I am the mom of the unit as well. My job is to take care of the nurses, the physicians … and the patients.”
It’s a 24/7 kind of job if you are taking administrative responsibilities at home. At the hospital, there are eighthour shifts, but also what amounts to 12-hour shifts.
At home, with two dogs and two cats in the mix, the
Youngmark household sounds lively. As a family, they cook every other day but also try to support local businesses with restaurant takeout.
There are challenges to having two adult children, “pseudo” or not, living with their parents with everyone sheltering in place, she said.
“But not only do I love my kids, I like them. I like the people they are becoming.”
■■■
For paramedic Lyndsay McKeown, a hectic job has been unexpectedly changed.
“Normally we are super busy, maybe 10,000 calls a year on average, but since the whole pandemic started, the call volume has been pretty low because people are terrified to go to the hospital,” she said.
Mrs. McKeown works for the Medical Rescue Team South Authority in Mt. Lebanon. She and husband, Brian McKeown, a lieutenant with the Castle Shannon police department, have a son, Killian, 2.
Days can be long; twice a week she pulls 16-hour shifts and one 8-hour shift. Days can be worrisome: Mrs. McKeown said there might be up to three “high index of suspicion” COVID-19 calls a shift.
“But we have the N95 masks, the goggles, the face shields, gowns … you just have to take extra precautions. We don’t want to bring any of that home.”
After going in and out of emergency rooms, “my main concern is my son. As soon as I get home I pretty much undress in the laundry room, I immediately shower, disinfect everything.
“I mean, it’s scary. You worry there are germs everywhere.”
Because of his young age, she added, Killian is blessedly unaware of his parents’ concerns. At home, Mrs. McKeown just gets to be a mom.
■■■
For Dr. Sylvia Owusu Ansah, it isn’t a matter of organization, but of timing.
Dr. Owusu Ansah finds herself leaving her Squirrel Hill home an hour earlier than in the pre-COVID-19 days to make time for added prep work: cleaning her work station at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in Lawrenceville, where she is the EMS medical director, and making sure her personal PPE is in order.
By the time she’s in the ER, a lot more thought is put toward things that used to be rote, like hand-washing.
“It’s now kind of a mental process,” she said.
Dr. Owusu Ansah has never been one to sit around, anyway. She’s an authority on paramedic procedures involving children and has written on that and other subjects — she blogs to help reassure parents when their kids are sick, and she is writing about this current pandemic experience.
And, of course, she’s a mom.
Dr. Owusu Ansah and her husband, Jason Cruz, have two daughters, Sierra Cruz, 12, and Samantha Cruz, 4. In the beginning of sheltering at home, the Pittsburgh Public Schools didn’t have online classes, so she found some lessons via John Hopkins University.
There are simple pleasures in being able to just have meals together. (“We have lunch now; that never happened before. We were like ships passing in the night.”)
Although their younger daughter hasn’t quite grasped essential-vs.-nonessential situations, Sierra “is quite astute, very well-adjusted, very aware of what I do, why Mom needs to leave early.”
In all of this, Dr. Owusu Ansah is also working on a memoir, which she said she is “able to get through pretty well.
“It’s basically about how patients have changed me, and not the other way around.”
■■■
Dr. Brooke Paha’s young son, Max, doesn’t like masks.
“The one or two times he has seen me wearing a [cloth] mask when I was outside a store and my husband was with him, he was kind of frightened and immediately said, ‘No mask! No mask!’”
But as an emergency room physician at Allegheny
Health Network’s Forbes Hospital in Monroeville, Dr. Paha’s PPE includes multiple face coverings every day.
The Forest Hills family — husband Edward Bursch is a film editor who often works from home — has been adjusting to keeping a toddler occupied in this unusual time. And it’s going to get more interesting: Dr. Paha is 37 weeks pregnant.
“This one is a girl, or so they say,” she said.
The now-familiar routine of changing clothes and showering in the basement before even setting foot upstairs will shortly give way to changing diapers.
Until then, there are precautions to take at work, as well. Knowing that the staff has proper equipment eases the stress, she said, but there is a certain sadness as well.
“You are seeing patients you know who have already tested positive and are coming back in because they are more ill.”
On the advice of her obstetrician, Dr. Paha will soon stop going into the ER: “Because nobody wants to be stranded in the ER with a doctor leaving because they’re going into labor,” she said, laughing.
She plans to take maternity leave until early September, and she hopes that she returns to a safer world.
“It’s a bittersweet thing. I’ll definitely be looking forward to having this time with my family and to be able to protect us all. But at the same time, there is the physician part of me that feels a little bit of guilt because I feel like I should still be caring for people.”
■■■
As clinical director for Excela Health Westmoreland
Hospital in Greensburg, Megan Shearer’s job included establishing a unit to take on COVID-19 patients who were not in the ICU. “My role was to make sure the unit was set up and ready ... we wanted to make sure any staff walking on to our unit was educated.”
And then she left, but for the nicest of reasons: Mrs. Shearer began maternity leave April 17 when she gave birth to her first child, a son she and her husband, Matt, named Mick.
“It’s nice, I’ve been able to fully bond with this child, although of course we can’t have people over,” she said, talking on speakerphone with Mick asleep in her arms.
Her husband, a technical operations manager, has been working from their Mount Pleasant home.
Dealing with patients in a hospital setting through 38 weeks of pregnancy wasn’t stressful, she said. Mr. Shearer felt differently.
“I was way more concerned,” he said. “Megan, she has the nurse mentality. They don’t seem to be afraid of almost anything. I wanted her to work from home almost from day one when they started talking about a COVID unit.”
“I felt more safe on the unit, wearing all the protective equipment, than when we went out [to the grocery store],” Mrs. Shearer said. “We were over-preparing to be over-safe.”
■■■
As a pulmonary specialist, Dr. Tiffany DuMont is involved with COVID-19 cases at Allegheny General Hospital on the North Side.
“But we haven’t become so overwhelmed. In some ways it’s like a typical day in the ICU.”
After all, the Ohio Township resident noted, “as ICU doctors we are put in stressful environments on a daily basis.”
That’s work. At home, she and Stephen Flanigan are raising a toddler, Zachary, who is 2½. Her husband works in IT, so he’s able to be at home.
Zachary is nearly old enough to realize some things are different — but not quite.
“It’s hard for him to understand, because he’s so little, but he’s asked to go to the park, and I have to tell him the park is closed,” she said. Zachary does see some of his cousins; his aunt, Brooke DuMont, lives nearby and has been helping to watch him.
“She’s amazing. She lives just 10 minutes away.”
The new routines of changing clothes constantly, making sure not to bring home the virus are embedded by now.
“I make sure I protect myself and therefore I protect the rest of my family.”
■■■
Not being able to spend time with family is hard — Alison O’Malley is witnessing that both at home and at work.
Ms. O’Malley, a nurse at UPMC Passavant Hospital in McCandless, said her daughter, Addison Hase, 9, is used to visiting with grandparents.
“My parents are a big part of her life,” said Ms. O’Malley, who lives in Emsworth and is studying online for a master’s degree.
She has a special empathy for patients in the medical ICU at work, who are not permitted to have visitors.
“That’s probably one of the hardest things to see,” she said. “But our leadership team has been great. There are lots of iPads available, and we have been FaceTiming family members as much as possible. We also set up Zoom on the internet to conference family members to discuss care plans.”
The internet has been helpful in keeping Addison both entertained and educated, she said. The Avonworth School District has been conducting online classes: “We’re lucky; it’s been a very seamless transition.”
Staying home hasn’t been easy for her daughter, said Ms. O’Malley, who co-parents with Addison’s father.
“But she understands she has an important role in all of this, too. I tell her it’s just as important as going to work.”