n St. Bernard grad Amanda Mullane adjusts on the fly at Jersey City Hospital.
St. Bernard graduate Amanda Mullane adjusts on the fly at Jersey City hospital
Amanda Mullane was asked what a normal day for her was like before COVID-19 became a nurse's greatest apprehension.
Mullane, the former Amanda Pietraszewski, a 2002 St. Bernard School graduate, valedictorian and 1,000-point scorer for the Saints girls' basketball team, paused for a moment to think. She is the clinical nutrition manager at Jersey City Medical Center in Jersey City, N.J., whose new normal includes snippets of her old job, but also now devising the correct composition of nutrients for nurses to infuse into patients who have been stricken by the coronavirus and are on ventilators.
At its surge, Jersey City Medical Center, overlooking New York Harbor, had more COVID-19-positive patients than all of New London County, Mullane said.
And it was during that time that Mullane, 36, began calling her mother Kathleen every day on her 25-minute ride home to Bloomfield, N.J. It's a practice, although the numbers of coronavirus patients at the hospital have been drastically reduced, that she still follows. Kathleen expects a call from her daughter each afternoon, Tuesday through Saturday, about 2:30.
"She's used to me calling," Mullane, a wife and mother of two, said in a recent telephone conversation. "She knows to tell me the good things. Especially at the beginning when everything was ramping up, we're right across the Holland Tunnel, I had a hard time listening to
“All the departments did their best to support one another through the pandemic. Administrators became transporters and HR staff were distributing supplies to the units. It was great teamwork . ... I give so much credit to nursing. I didn't have to be in that fire, but our office is right behind the ER. We could feel it. We knew it.”
AMANDA (PIETRASZEWSKI) MULLANE, EX-ST. BERNARD BASKETBALL PLAYER
ON LEADING HER DEPARTMENT AT HEIGHT OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC AT JERSEY CITY MEDICAL CENTER
what was happening in New York. I knew we were a week, a week and a half behind them.
"I used to listen to 1010 WINS or different podcasts. When the surge was going up, I was so emotional . ... Things happened so quickly; so many changes in the hospital happened. I called my mom and she would listen to the (New York governor Andrew) Cuomo briefings, the Gov. (Phil) Murphy briefings (from New Jersey) and kind of told me what was going on.
"I remember bawling when she told me the boat was coming (USNS Comfort, deployed to New York to assist with the virus outbreak). I was like, 'It needs to be there today.' She takes notes. She already filled a 100-page notebook with just notes. Talking to my mom, it's therapeutic."
••••• Mullane, nicknamed "A.P." by her teammates while at St. Bernard, comes home every day to her husband Tom, 3-year-old son Tommy and 5-month-old daughter Andi (full name Andromeda Petra Mullane, or the next "A.P.")
Mullane, a former Salem resident who once scored 42 points in a game for coach Mike Nystrom's St. Bernard team, loved basketball.
The 1992 U.S. Olympic team, dubbed the "Dream Team" en route to winning the gold medal at the Summer Games in Barcelona, captured her attention when she was just in elementary school.
"I remember that Olympic team and being so into it," Mullane said. "Also, I grew up in a neighborhood with Chris Winters, who went to Central (Connecticut) and played at Central, and Whitney Coleman (who went on to play for the Monmouth men's basketball team).
"There was a basketball hoop. You would hear someone dribbling the basketball and everyone would come outside. Then there was a mobile hoop, too, and we could set it up so we could play full court. I remember people used to say, 'What's in the water at Sullivan Road?'"
Nystrom recalls that Mullane sprouted to her current height of 5-foot-10 from 5-2 or 5-3 during her high school career, all the while retaining her skills as a guard. That made her a difficult matchup. She is one of six 1,000-point scorers in St. Bernard history.
"I love St. Bernard," Mullane said. "The kindness. Everyone was friends. I felt really, really lucky."
"Her junior year was probably the best year we had," Nystrom said. "We had four seniors and she was a junior. "We played NFA back when they had (stars Krista) Rappahahn and (Saona) Chapman. I was proud of those games. (NFA coach Bill Scarlata) kept his starters in and pressed us the whole game."
Mullane returns when she can for alumni games. Nystrom calls her "a rare kid."
"I mean that in the best way," Nystrom said. "She was really fun to coach. She was never a problem. Her parents (Kathleen and David) were always great. Amanda, she was a tremendous kid."
Mullane, a math whiz, went on to attend New York University. She was disappointed to find there were no open tryouts for the women's basketball team but she managed the men's team and graduated cum laude with a B.S. degree in math/secondary education with a minor in nutrition.
She taught math at The James Baldwin School in Manhattan, where she met her husband Tom, also a teacher, and went back to NYU at night to become a dietician, which she describes as "a really great combination of math and science."
She completed a dietetic internship at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. It was there, fulfilling the requisite number of rotations in a hospital setting, that she fell in love with that combination of math and science which would determine her future.
Mullane's first job in the field came at University Hospital in Newark, where she was the primary dietician for the neonatal intensive care unit, a specialized post for just a beginner. She learned quickly, relying heavily on her math skills to determine the right nutritional base for the newborns in her care.
In 2014, she was hired in Jersey City.
••••• Now, when a COVID-19 patient is discharged from the hospital or extubated after spending time on a ventilator, the chords from the song "Here Comes the Sun" echo throughout the Jersey City Medical Center.
"They're sharing how many discharges. They have it on this big board," Mullane said. "These hopeful things started happening."
Before COVID-19, a typical day for Mullane would be to check in with the eight dieticians in her charge or to provide one-on-one instruction for the hospital's newly diagnosed diabetics or dialysis patients. She worked with the wound team to provide adequate nutrition for its patients and made sure the food trays at Jersey City were accurate. She completed audits for the State of New Jersey.
Then, as coronavirus patients flooded the hospital by the hundreds, things changed.
Mullane, who formerly wore dress clothes to the hospital for her position, donned scrubs. Her ordering sequence took on somewhat of a scramble, as items became scarce — pharmacies began calling to report what they were out of, she said. Her inbox became a point of information shared by others in her field. She learned to improvise. "Professional groups and other colleagues of mine were asking, 'What have you seen?' I was dispersing information with my team," Mullane said. "There were all of these different webinars. I would tell my team, 'Come sit in the office, we're going to listen to this.'
"All the departments did their best to support one another through the pandemic. Administrators became transporters and HR staff were distributing supplies to the units. It was great teamwork . ... I give so much credit to nursing. I didn't have to be in that fire, but our office is right behind the ER. We could feel it. We knew it."
Today, Mullane, still comes home, disinfects her car and steps into a bucket of bleach that Tom has prepared before dumping her clothes in a garbage bag, showering and washing her hair immediately. She still receives doses of inspiration from Kathleen via telephone.
But among those rituals, Mullane hears more and more choruses of "Here Comes the Sun."
"There's fast testing. All my tubing is back in stock. There's no back orders any more," Mullane said. "PPE (personal protective equipment) is coming in like crazy. Food is coming in like crazy . ... Those days, I'm so glad they're past." v.fulkerson@theday.com