health care,” Stanford said.
The respiratory program reached out
to her, and she said it sounded interesting.
She never thought she’d ever be dealing
with something like COVID-19 and a
coronavirus pandemic.
“We’re having a lot of sick patients
coming in here. We’ve had a handful of
them we’ve had to treat,” Stanford said.
They use ventilators and respirators
to basically breathe for the patients while
they get through the illness.
“It’s kind of a mix of all ages that have
been critical,” she said.
She said they work 12-hour shifts and
check on patients hourly.
There usually is a respiratory therapist
in the emergency room, one in critical
care and one on the medical floors.
“It’s been a lot more stressful,” Stanford
said about her job.
Wearing masks all the time is tiring,
she said.
Even if patients have not tested positive
for COVID, or it hasn’t been ruled
out yet, the patients have to be treated as
if they are COVID-positive.
Another challenge pertains to their
equipment, including the ventilators,
nebulizer and BiPAP (bilevel positive
airway pressure) machines.
“We’ve tried to order from companies,
but the supplies are on back order,” she
said.
“So much has to do with the air
particles,” she said about getting filters in
place.
She said they try to work with it,
as everybody is dealing with the same
struggles.
Stanford said at the beginning of the
pandemic, she remembers an initial positive
COVID case in which the person
was not in isolation and a lot of employees
were exposed.
“That was kind of a big scare. We
weren’t protected at that time,” she said,
adding that going home to their families
knowing they had been exposed was
hard.
Stanford has a husband and three children
at home, and after that patient, she
had quarantined herself off to her room
for 14 days and was monitoring herself,
she said.
“I think it’s gotten better. We have
it more under control,” she said about
working now during the pandemic. “We
were going day to day, not knowing and a
lot of things were changing.”
She said they’ve had months to handle
the situation, and now everybody is on
the same page and she feels more protected.
“If we get hit hard, we’re a little bit
ready for it,” she said.
One recent morning, Stanford said
there were multiple calls to the ER and
she had to put a woman on BiPAP, which
is a step before placing a patient on a
ventilator.
COVID rule out patients can be
placed in the Intensive Care Unit, while
positive cases are placed in a negative
pressure room, isolation area. They have
12 beds in the ICU, but most of the time
they’re running three or four at the most.
Stanford dresses in a gown and hood,
glasses and everything from head to toe
when checking hourly on ventilation
patients. Normally in the past she would
just wear gloves.
She responds to any codes that come
in through the ER, treating patients as if
they are a COVID patient.
She said they have to put on personal
protective equipment for every code
that comes in because it’s the unknown.
Codes could be for asthmatic and COPD
patients.
Stanford said she mostly
will remember from the
coronavirus pandemic, “all the
mass chaos” and just the way it
has changed everything.
“I hope there is a normal
some day again,” she said.
As for the future, she said
she really doesn’t know what
to expect.
She said she thinks probably
for them, they will continue
taking a lot of precautions.
“I think that will be something
as a new normal for us,”
she said about their personal
protective equipment.
Respiratory therapist
Brooke Stanford
demonstrates her
job with another OSF
employee.
PHOTO PROVIDED
OUR COMMUNITY 2020 23