Prairie Village nurse returns home after helping in COVID-19 hot spot

Brenda Kotar, a single mother of three, has long loved teaching.

The registered nurse in the past has worked in pediatrics at Children’s Mercy Hospital and as a nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City. While she has a master’s degree in nursing administration, her dislike of administrative work drew her to teaching.

Kotar, 45, is now an instructor of nursing at MCC-Penn Valley.

In January, her oldest daughter was in a study-abroad program in South Korea when the COVID-19 outbreak started. Kotar began to monitor the news on the virus and decided to bring her daughter home. She said that is when she realized that this illness was very serious and was likely to make its way to the United States.

Getting her daughter home was difficult logistically, but Kotar said it was the right thing to do.

After her daughter was home safely, Kotar continued to monitor the news. She said she was up at night watching the news and was struck by the lack of nurses, the struggle to provide patient care and the way the hospitals were quickly overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

Kotar said she thought about making masks or chalk drawings to show support for healthcare workers, but she knew she could and should do more to help. In mid-March, with the COVID-19 outbreak hitting Kansas City, her nursing classes went online and she was teaching from home.

She gathered her children and discussed the possibility of signing on with Crucial Staffing, a company in Overland Park that was hiring nurses to work on the front lines of the pandemic in cities like New Orleans and New York.

“I just knew it was the right time. My kids were able to take care of themselves and I felt it was the right time for me to be able to go,” Kotar said from her driveway in Prairie Village.

Kotar said she could manage her online teaching from anywhere and she could pass this real-life experience along to her students.

Kotar left Kansas City on April 5 and had a layover in Chicago, where she boarded a flight to New York. The plane was full of nurses volunteering to head into the coronavirus hot spots in New York to help. “We immediately became friends,” Kotar said of the group.

She was assigned to the Jacobi hospital in the Bronx, which Kotar said had been hit hard by the crisis. She was assigned to a pediatric ward that had been converted to a unit for COVID-19 patients ranging in age from 20 to 60.

“Nurses weren’t showing up for work,” Kotar said. “They were sick, burned out, they quit, their family members were sick, they were short-staffed, then COVID hit.”

Kotar said she was nervous and knew it was going to be stressful at first.

“You know the fundamentals, you have the nursing skills, but you don’t know the procedures at this hospital,” Kotar said. Working many days in a row, Kotar said she would see patients come in, but the joy was in seeing them leave.

“It was rewarding to see how much I impacted their care for them to be able to then go home,” Kotar said.

One patient, the mother of an 11-year-old daughter, recovered from the new coronavirus and was able to go home to her daughter.

“Having kids myself, I felt like that was amazing to be able to see her go home and be healthy,” Kotar said.

“It was so rewarding, I felt so lucky,” Kotar said. “I had the skills to go there and help these people and it was silly for me to just sit here and not do something.”

At the start of each 12-hour or longer shift, Kotar would receive a new N95 mask. Many of the patients in her unit had underlying heath conditions such as diabetes. She said while some patients went home, others were transferred to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where she did not know of their fate.

“I think the scariest part was seeing the four tractor trailers parked outside my unit and knowing that’s where they were putting COVID patients who had passed on,” Kotar said. “And also knowing how quickly the COVID patient could get sick, they could be OK and then just within three or four hours, they would need to be on a ventilator.

“I saw people my age who died,” Kotar said.

She said as a teacher for future nurses, this will set a good example for her students at Penn Valley, but her motivation was to help, to heal and to make a difference through her direct patient care.

“For me, it was just going to do a job that I had the skills to do,” Kotar said.

As word got out that Kotar was working in COVID-19 hot spot in New York, she said she received tons of messages of support from her friends, neighbors and family. She also said that the hospital staff was very grateful for the nurses who traveled to aid their hospital in the midst of a pandemic.

After nearly a month, Kotar returned to Kansas City, where she spent a week in quarantine in a downtown hotel room. For her second week of quarantine, her daughter arranged for Kotar to quarantine in a large, loaner R.V., which was parked outside her house, where her front yard was dotted with signs of support and appreciate.

Kotar said her favorite sign was not the one that read, “A Frontline Hero Lives Here!,” but rather the one that read, “Welcome home Mommy.”

The neighbors greeted Kotar with a small drive-by parade to show their appreciation and welcome her back to the neighborhood.

“When I came home it was overwhelming because so many people have been so giving on my street, my neighbors,” Kotar said. “There’s signs that say I’m a hero. I don’t feel like at all like hero, but it’s so comforting to know that people do care and people are rallying behind you when you are doing something so difficult.”

This story was originally published May 19, 2020 at 5:00 AM.