Our Community 2020 | Page 23

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