The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
One of the first married couples in Conn. to get the vaccine share their experiences.
Ewelina and Michelle McDade are one of the first married couples in Connecticut to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. They embody what this breakthrough means for their profession.
Now, they and other exhausted heroes of the pandemic are ready to return to their regular, hardworking lives.
The crush of media cameras still swelled inside a tent on the grounds of Hartford Hospital on Dec. 14, when Ewelina McDade sat for one of the first COVID-19 vaccinations in Connecticut, and the nation. Just a few minutes earlier the governor, the CEO of the Hartford HealthCare hospital chain and a lineup of medical people had offered soaring words about what the vaccine meant, nine months after coronavirus shut the nation down. McDade, manager of nursing education at the Hartford HealthCare hospitals in New Britain, Southington and Meriden, didn’t need a pep talk on the vaccine’s safety and its role in ending the mayhem. She had done the research and she lived the crisis alongside her colleagues — often, in 2020, on the medical floors with sick patients. Three months before, she had married Dr. Michelle McDade, associate chief of emergency medicine at Hospital of Central Connecticut in New Britain, in a rooftop ceremony in Washington, D.C. And Michelle was there on that wet pre-Christmas morning to witness Ewelina making history. Three days later, when Michelle McDade took the vaccine, they became almost certainly Connecticut’s first COVID-vaccinated couple. The newlyweds, who live in Farmington with their four children under age 12 (two from each parent) quickly emerged as spokeswomen for the vaccine, combining science with experience on the front lines. It’s not just happenstance or symbolism that they went first. Intensely if not uniquely, the McDades embody the vaccine and what it means for their profession of exhausted heroes ready to return to regular, hardworking lives that are stressful enough without a pandemic.
“I feel definitely like the vaccine has been our first glimmer of hope,” said Michelle McDade, a marathon runner. “There’s no doubt about it.”
It’s a hope not only for its promise to lower the illness volume but also for what Michelle McDade calls “emotional safety” for doctors and nurses in close contact with patients all day long.
Looking to spread that sense of safety to skittish people, in late December the McDades produced a researched Q&A on the vaccine. It’s been distributed widely and translated into Polish, Ewelina’s native language. Read it and you’re less likely to hesitate to get the vaccine.
‘I feel this sense of pride’
The crisis hasn’t abated yet at the larger hospitals that see a lot of COVID patients, the McDades say.
Michelle McDade arrived for work at 7 a.m. on Monday of last week, Jan. 18, to find six of the nine exam rooms in her charge filled with people who had been checked in as inpatients — but without free beds to send them upstairs on the floors.
“And that’s just my section,” she told me. “If the emergency room is full, we can’t stop people from coming. People walk in, ambulances keep coming. So we just have to adapt and triage and do the best that we can.”
I ask how she feels, working in the middle of this time and place, as the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna finally arrive in mass, though slower than hoped, along with better treatment methods and, perhaps, a natural easing of the pandemic.
“I feel this sense of pride, honestly, in health care people in general. This was an amazingly scary thing from the beginning,” Michelle McDade said. “Everybody, from the doctors to the respiratory therapists to the people who were cleaning the floors, people had to be very brave to do their jobs.”
And so the profession not only healed, but led the way toward coping. “We’ve sort of shown people how to do it,” she said. “’It’s OK, we’re going to be OK.’ ”
She continues, “Even down to the vaccine, I feel like my people, the health care people, are leading the way . ... Once again, my health care people are rolling their sleeves up and saying ‘It’s okay, we’ve got you, were going to help you.’”
Frayed nerves after 10 months
Michelle McDade will tell you about the heartbreak of delivering news of a death to families that haven’t been able to say goodbye to their loved ones.
“It almost feels cruel,” she said. “We would like people to at least have that time and closure.”
You wouldn’t expect an ER doc to sugarcoat reality and Michelle McDade doesn’t. At the start of the pandemic, she recalls, when death rates were higher and hospitals even more full, everyone showed pure gratitude for the health care workers risking their lives.
Now, many people have postponed medical care and nearly a year of the crisis has frayed nerves. “COVID 2.0 is like ‘Hey man, we’re tired of waiting to be seen,’” she said. “There’s definitely a lot less patience ... among patients.”
Far from sounding resentful, she sees the crisis through their eyes as well as those of her colleagues. “It’s hard to go to an emergency room and be seen in a hallway and have no privacy.”
And after nearly a year, doctors and nurses are still “working their tails off,” Michelle McDade said. “They are tired and people are home schooling their kids. Its rough. With the vaccine, there’s definitely something different in the mix.”
What the vaccine means now, even as the crisis persists and deaths mount, is that measure of safety for the front-line health workers. They no longer have to fear for their lives if they pass someone in a corridor the wrong way, accidentally touch an eye, or, as happened to Dr. McDade, spill a spot of a drink into their mouths
after it touched a partially removed mask.
She quickly washed out her mouth with soap and water — safety protocols haven’t changed after the vaccine — but having that inoculation made a big difference in her mindset.
“It definitely made me feel better, there’s no way to get around it,” she said, “so to just take away that margin of fear is better.”
‘We just feel so, so lucky’
Ewelina and Michelle McDade both eagerly talk about the science behind these two vaccines now flowing. Traditional vaccines rely on a purified, weak form of the very illness they’re trying to stop, thereby preparing a defense in our bodies.
The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines use no coronavirus, but rather a so-called messenger RNA , or mRNA, “which is a fancy term for a molecule with a code that prompts the body to create protein,” they wrote in their article. “The mRNA stimulates the body to create a protein that is similarly shaped to the spike protein (large orange spikes that we have all seen on the pictures of the outside of the COVID-19 virus).”
That prods us to make antibodies that protect against the illness with no danger. “The sophistication and elegance of this process is truly revolutionary and remarkable,” they wrote.
That’s why Ewelina told reporters that no, of course she wasn’t even remotely afraid to take the vaccine that first day. “I’ve done a significant review and it looks safe; nothing to worry about,” she told my colleague Bill Cummings. “When I looked at how the approach really works it made me comfortable to get the vaccine.”
As the first couple in the first group among perhaps 2.5 million Connecticut residents who will take the vaccine in 2021, the McDades view their inoculations as tools to help them make a difference.
“I feel so lucky, I feel like it’s such a privilege and I do not overlook that for one day,” Michelle McDade said. “I know that there are so many peole who want it who haven’t had it yet...We just feel so, so lucky. We feel so safe in the world.”