The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Nurse recovers from virus, mourns father.
BRIDGEPORT — Susan Goncalves is back working at St. Vincent’s Medical Center, where she has spent her entire career spanning more than three decades, and has been helping patients fight COVID-19.
Over the past few weeks, Goncalves was waging her own battle against the disease. First, she was diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 28. Two days later, she found out her father also had the disease. Five days after that, he was dead.
For Goncalves, it began one evening in late March when she dismissed the feeling of chills that came over her body as the heat being too low in her Derby home.
Goncalves had just returned home from St. Vincent’s, where her work had included screening patients in the lobby for symptoms of COVID-19. In spite of that, Goncalves didn’t initially make a connection between her chills and the contagious coronavirus.
“COVID-19 has hit the rest of the world, but you just think it won’t happen to you,” said Goncalves, who works as an off-shift nursing supervisor, informatics specialist and employee health nurse at the hospital.
When her chills passed during the night, it seemed she was right not to be worried. But they returned, and were soon joined by a fever, runny nose, a cough and “horrific back pain.” After calling the COVID-19 helpline set up by Hartford HealthCare, the parent company of St. Vincent’s, Goncalves was told she should get tested for the illness. She was tested on March 25 and learned she was positive three days later.
“Obviously, fear goes to your very core for a minute,” Goncalves said of the moment she learned she was ill. “Though, I think because I was not short of breath, I wasn’t that scared. By the time I got my test results, I was feeling pretty good.”
Then, Goncalves received news that completely obliterated any worries she might have about herself. On March 30, she received a call that her father, 87year-old Thomas Simanavage, had tested positive for COVID-19. He was a resident at the Jewish Home for the Elderly in Fairfield.
Due to the escalating pandemic, Goncalves hadn’t seen her father in weeks, and she said there’s no indication that either of them got the illness from each other. But he was ill, and declining quickly. By 6:30 a.m. April 4, he died.
Throughout those last days, the hardest part for Goncalves and her three siblings was not being able to be with their father. She was able to FaceTime with him regularly, but that lack of physical presence and contact was heartbreaking, she said.
“As a nurse, I believe nobody should die alone and I don’t think he did — I think there were people with him,” Goncalves said.
But it hurt that she wasn’t there.
During her father’s last days, Goncalves was quarantined with her own illness. She is married and one of her two sons lives with her. Her husband and son have not exhibited any symptoms, though they weren’t tested for the disease.
Goncalves knows she’s lucky that her illness was relatively mild and that she never developed the severe symptoms that some patients have faced. But she didn’t have time to feel lucky.
“Soon after I got the call about my dad, I don’t think I gave (my own illness) a second thought,” she said. “All my energies were going in that direction.”
Losing her father while recovering from her own illness was unspeakably difficult, Goncalves said, but it also reinforced her passion to help others.
So when she received a call from the Hartford HealthCare blood bank asking if she would like to donate plasma, she readily agreed.
Those who have recovered from COVID-19 are believed to have antibodies that could be helpful in treating the illness. Antibodies are proteins used by the immune system to fight against viruses, bacteria and other pathogens. Thus many organizations and agencies — including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — are calling on COVID-19 survivors to donate plasma.
For Goncalves, it was a nobrainer. As a nurse with 35 years of experience — all of it at St. Vincent’s — she felt it was her duty to do all she could to help others like herself and her father, even if it’s still unknown whether these plasma donations will actually help in fighting COVID-19.
“They tell you that for every bag of plasma you donate, you could save four lives,” Goncalves said. Though she knows “it’s not the be-all, end-all,” she felt called to donate.
So, she traveled to Rhode Island, where Hartford HealthCare has a blood donation center and donated plasma on April 20. Her contribution is appreciated and typical of the dedication of nurses and other health care professionals, said Daniel Gottschall, vice president of medical affairs for the Fairfield region of Hartford HealthCare and St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport.
“Anybody who goes into health care does it because they want to make a difference in people’s lives,” he said. “This is a very strong example of someone literally giving her own blood for the possibility of helping other human beings.”
In addition to her work at the hospital, Goncalves is an assistant professor in the Sacred Heart University School of Nursing, and felt there was an educational component to donating her plasma. She was the first nurse in her health care system to do so and, since her donation, other nurses who have survived the illness have turned to her for information and advice.
“As nurses, we are educators,” she said. “I just want to educate everybody.”