‘A little bit of hope’: Meet the first person in Kansas City to get new COVID vaccine
Twenty minutes after she became the first person announced in Kansas City to receive the new COVID-19 vaccine on Monday, Sarah Kiehl seemed to still have “butterflies.”
“It feels like a little bit of hope, a little bit of light, a little bit of chance that we might start to see some healing and see some people truly getting better and potentially tackling this virus,” Kiehl, a registered nurse at Truman Medical Centers/University Health, said at a press conference.
She didn’t know that her employer was receiving one of the first shipments in Missouri of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that day, much less that she’d be the first to get it.
So on a day that local physicians, hospital executives and politicians hailed as historic, Kiehl rolled up the sleeve of her black scrub top and got inoculated.
The hospital’s video of Kiehl getting the shot in her right arm showed her raising her left arm in triumph and letting out an exuberant “Wooooooooh!”
She called the moment “extremely emotional” as thoughts of her current COVID-19 patients, and the ones she has lost, rolled through her mind.
“I actually thought I might be receiving this thing that could be the ticket to seeing these patients get better and I just keep imagining all the patients I’ve watched die in this time, all the patients who I’ve FaceTimed with their families on their deathbeds,” she told reporters.
“I could see their faces in my mind and just think this might be how we finally get out of this really tragic, heavy time.”
In both Kansas and Missouri, health care workers and nursing home residents are at the front of the line in distribution plans submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Citing security reasons, Truman officials did not disclose what time their shipment arrived or even how many doses were delivered.
The hospital system has 4,500 employees. The first doses will be given to staff members like Kiehl who work directly with COVID-19 patients.
She told reporters the shot itself felt similar to a flu shot, “just a little pinch,” she said.
She said she would encourage others to get vaccinated. Officials in both Kansas and Missouri have said they expect the vaccine to become available to the general public in spring or summer.
“I fully believe in bodily autonomy, but if we can take this one step closer to beating this virus, I think it’s absolutely worth it,” said Kiehl. “Even if this is the ticket, we have a very long road ahead of us, but I think this leap of faith is how we’re going to get through.”
Kiehl, who has worked three of her six years at Truman in the ICU, said she had never seen an entire intensive care unit dedicated to one illness, until this novel coronavirus struck.
“That has never happened. And our COVID ICU has frequently been running out of beds, unfortunately, sometimes, only having beds when people have passed away,” she said.
In an interview with The Star in May, Kiehl said it was nice that health care workers were being hailed as heroes, but it made her feel “weird” because heroes are supposed to slay the enemy.
And at that point in the pandemic, with a vaccine still appearing far from reach, she felt more exhausted than heroic. But she had a job to do, one that she knows is far from over.
“I can’t not finish what we started,” Kiehl said then. “It’s kind of a no-brainer to me. It’s exhausting, yes. But the whole reason I got into nursing is to serve the population we serve at Truman. They deserve excellent care in the midst of this.”
This story was originally published December 14, 2020 at 5:32 PM.
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