And then it happened. The inevitable.

After 4 months of preparing for an invisible enemy attack, and meticulous defending, it happened. At the time, none of us really knew what to expect. We heard the news, we read the stories, but we really didn’t know. We saw images of healthcare workers jumping out of hospitals on TV. Our sister beehive, hundreds of miles a way was on the news for having one of the first outbreaks in our state. Corporation X, asked for staff to volunteer to go assist our sister beehive. Large sums of pay was provided. And a small team from our beehive left to go help. While the team was a way, a resident that had to go to dialysis for treatment 3 x week, returned to the facility with one of those paper bracelets stapled around his wrist like a child does with an important note from the teacher. It was labelled for the Director of Nursing only. It was really demeaning, I thought. This resident is not confused. He is a sharp as a tack, why the need to treat him like a child. And then I read the note. It basically stated that a week before, the resident was exposed to COVID during his dialysis treatment, and he needed to be considered positive for COVID. Tests were a rather novel thing then, and it took 7-10 days to get results. To add insult to injury, the note read, that he could not return to his dialysis center for at least 21 days and that he would need to be taken to a dialysis center 75 miles a way to receive his 3 x week treatment. I remember thinking, “Are you kidding me?” If you know me, then you know I word vomit non-stop and I have a temper. So phone calls were made and things I said were probably not that great. The dialysis center did not tell the resident the information the letter contained. Then it hit me, I have a whole situation. The resident was moved to a very desolate area in the beehive as well as his room mate. They were moved to separate rooms. Plastic was hung from the ceiling to floor. It has to be air tight. We needed staff that would only work on what was called the “hot unit ” They would have to agree to limit their exposure to their families at home and to the community at large. They would be fighting the deadly invisible enemy isolated from the rest of the beehive, by providing care for the residents with an illness we had never seen. In the beginning, everyone was afraid. Very few people would volunteer. However Merida, Chuck Nora, and myself became the tributes. Merida took the first shift, while Chuck Nora prepared her home life for the journey, and I prepared the mountains of paperwork and the required reporting to every level of government agencies.

Merida took the first shift. I felt terribly guilty. I stayed the whole shift with her at the beehive. It began around 3pm and it was scheduled to end around 6am. I worked in my office, I would sneak into the hot unit geared up in my rain suit to check on Merida, and the guests she cared for. Around 3am, I decided I should probably try to get some rest. I laid down in my office floor, it was quiet. And then I had my first panic attack. The thoughts racing with worry and fear for Merida, her family, the guests on the hot unit, and then for my family. My rest was short lived, as I decided to just stay busy and focus on anything else but the fear. Merida is one of the bravest people I have ever met. Chuck Nora is another truly brave person I know. Chuck Nora had been a nurse nearly 40 years at that time. She is stubborn, fearless, and at times impossible. She is a 5-2″ silver – haired, drill sergeant. Merida had seen a meme about Chuck Norris being exposed to COVID, and COVID had to go into isolation. Merida printed that meme and replaced Norris’s face with Chuck Nora’s. Her nickname stuck and she will be forever known by it. Chuck Nora was also sensible. She had been a nurse in a TB hospital, worked when HIV/AIDS was a new thing, and she would often comment about how she had never seen the alarms raised like this before. I tried like crazy to stop her from working the hot unit. She would not hear of it. She would say, “Stop it! I am not afraid of this.” I used to tease her and would tell her that she had been a nurse since the Spanish Influenza of 1918, and she would say that she pretty much had been.

The 2 residents on the hot unit made a quick, full recovery with little to no symptoms during their illness. I wish I could say the outcome would always be this way.