Kansas City nurses told hospital they needed masks. They didn’t need to be told to hush
Most of us are in humble awe of what nurses are doing for all of us during this pandemic. That’s why a retired Kansas farmer thought to send his extra protective mask to America’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, along with a letter asking that it be given to a New York nurse or doctor on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19. (And sir, thank you for making us cry in a good way with that act of kindness.)
Even those “pro-freedom” protesters shouting at masked health care workers in scrubs that they must be paid actors, or probably work in abortion clinics, or should “go to China if you want communism” are surely outliers.
Yet some nurses are being treated with contempt by their own employers, and that’s both nothing new and 10 kinds of wrong. Take Kansas City’s Research Medical Center, for instance.
Celia Yap-Banago, one of the two Research nurses who lacked proper protective equipment, treated the same coronavirus patient and then got sick with COVID-19 themselves, died last week. And Research, no matter what the lawyers and crisis communicators at your owners HCA Midwest Health say, you need to stop whining about how inappropriate it is for the mean old nurses’ union to be pressing for proper protective equipment at a sad time like this.
“We’re thinking only of Celia and her beautiful family right now,” the hospital’s news release said, in one of several passages that was underlined and in bold type. Thinking only of Celia and of your potential legal liability, I think you meant to say. “We all deserve the opportunity to mourn the loss of her,” it said.
The statement also noted rather unmournfully that “We are deeply disappointed that while we continue to mourn our dear colleague and friend, Celia, the union is seeking to exploit Celia’s death as an opportunity to criticize the hospital for a *global* PPE shortage.” The hospital was scrupulously following all CDC guidelines, it said, in yet another underlined passage.
Of course, your tender hearts might not be hurting if 69-year-old Yap-Banago, who on Tuesday would have celebrated 40 years at the hospital, and her 36-year-old colleague Charlene Carter had been better protected.
“Had we had access to the proper protective equipment, I really feel like in my heart Celia would probably be here,” Carter has said. So Research, screw up your courage and tell corporate that the only response worthy of the woman you lost is a) groveling and b) asking nurses what else you can do for them.
As of mid-April, some 9,300 American health care workers had been diagnosed with COVID-19, and at least 27 had died, according to a CDC report that also said this is almost certainly an undercount. All their colleagues want is to stay healthy so they can win this fight against a devious and painful adversary.
Nurses who’ve lost their lives did so no less heroically than those first responders who ran into the Twin Towers on 9/11. Many have volunteered for duty with COVID-19 patients, and some have traveled across the country to pitch in where needed most.
Among the nurses who’ve died are Boston’s Rose Taldon, who worked three jobs, New York’s Kious Kelly, who worked in a hospital where nurses without PPE had posted on social media about having to settle for wearing garbage bags over their scrubs, and Chicago’s Josephine Tapiru, a cancer survivor and licensed practical nurse who worked in two nursing homes.
The coronavirus has claimed so many lives in nursing homes in part because nurses and nursing assistants who work in these facilities are so poorly paid that they often have to work more than one job, and have unwittingly carried the virus from one place to another.
Tapiru also unknowingly carried it home. Her 20-year-old son, a previously healthy former high school football player, also died of COVID-19. And her husband learned about their deaths in his hospital bed, via a video hookup, after he came off a ventilator.
Meghan Cowden Jones, a 25-year-old registered nurse who cares for COVID-19 patients at University Hospital in Madison, Wisconsin, is the nurse who in news photographs of an anti-shutdown protest Friday is holding a sign that says “COVID-19 overwhelms hospitals. In overwhelmed hospitals, more people die. You can save lives, too. Please stay home.” She’s also the daughter-in-law of two of my college classmates, and told me that after working 12-hour shifts three days in a row, she felt compelled to spend her day off at the protest, as a human counterpoint to the message that it’s time to loosen up.
“People were not kind,” she said. Protesters wearing Trump gear, waving flags and carrying guns yelled that she was “a misinformed millennial in a nurse costume” who “probably got those scrubs at Goodwill.”
Boy, did they have her number. (This, Mr. Trump, is sarcasm.)
Meghan, a Purdue University grad, originally wanted to become a doctor, but realized that a mix of medicine and more “hands-on helping people” was her true calling. When a hospital patient cries out in the middle of the night, she says, it’s not always because they need anything medical or material at all. Sometimes, they call out “so you can be with them when they cry,” which she considers a privilege. “I love it, and wouldn’t do anything else.”
When nurses cry out in broad daylight for what they need to keep working, it should be our privilege to answer, too.
This story was originally published April 27, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
