By Steve Brawner
© 2020 by Steve Brawner Communications, Inc.
If the first Gulf War in 1990-91 was when Americans relearned respect for military service personnel, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 reminded us of the bravery of firefighters, then 2020 is the year to appreciate doctors and nurses who are battling the COVID-19 pandemic on the front lines.
Each year, Time magazine names its Person of the Year, and in that spirit I argue for an Arkansan or Arkansans of the Year in my little newspaper column. This year, there can be only one choice: the state’s brave, caring medical professionals.
One of them is Elizabeth Sullivan, a registered nurse and intensive care unit clinical services manager at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Reached by phone Dec. 3, she said she’d been working 60 hours a week. At the time, 17 of her unit’s 28 patients had COVID, and they were very sick. When they arrive, they are struggling to breathe but are able to talk enough to have a short conversation. They’re scared, which only makes them breathe faster, so the nurses try to calm them down.
That day, most of the patients were in their 50s and above with underlying health conditions, but she had treated other types, including a healthy young man who thought he might have caught the disease at the gym.
“He was our second loss. … It was extremely tough,” she said. “We were very, very attached to both him and his family.”
Sullivan estimated that 50 patients who have come through her unit had died. The nurses had fought for all of them. They became like the patients’ families because their real families could only be with them through an iPad app. For one patient, the family requested the nurses play Willie Nelson’s “Blue Skies,” her favorite song. The nurses did so, holding her hand and keeping the tablet pointed at the ceiling so the family could be present in her passing remotely.
While Sullivan sees patients at the end of their hospital journey – one way or the other – Barbara McDonald sees them at the beginning. She’s a nurse practitioner who screens patients from a UAMS garage to determine if they need further testing, if they can go home, or if they should be admitted to the hospital. At first, they’re sitting in their car and she’s outside their window. At times she’s walking an arm’s length from them. She said says prays for each one she sends to the emergency room.
McDonald, who previously served in the Air Force, volunteered for this duty
“As a nurse and then a nurse practitioner, you’re called to take care of people, to make a difference, and so having the opportunity to be part of this and to be able to make a difference and to touch people, that’s a gift,” she said. “It’s not something that I would have wished to have happened, but it’s a privilege to be able to serve.”
Front line medical professionals are in the middle of the actual battle that’s taking place while many of the rest of us have had the luxury of arguing over how serious COVID-19 is, about masks, and about everything else we’re arguing about. Everything’s got to be political these days.
Sullivan is aware of all that, but she doesn’t try to do much about it. When she sees someone express an opinion on Facebook that doesn’t match her experiences, she just keeps scrolling. She won’t change anyone’s mind, so she just does her job.
“We get asked all the time, you know, ‘Hey, people aren’t wearing their mask in public. How do you feel about that?’” she said. “You know what? I’m sorry that they feel that way. I hope you don’t end up in here. I really do. But if you do, I’m going to take care of you.”
Does anyone doubt that? No matter what happens out here, she’ll take care of us in there, just like Barbara McDonald and thousands of other front line servant-healers across Arkansas have done. In a year like no other, they were the Arkansans of the Year.
Steve Brawner is a syndicated columnist in Arkansas. Email him at brawnersteve@mac.com. Follow him on Twitter at @stevebrawner.