Karen Neis 

When Delta hit, that’s when it became so serious that you couldn’t even find a bed to put another patient into. Besides having the normal volume of patients that are coming into the ER that need medical care for heart attacks, strokes, abdominal pains, all those kinds of patients. I’m trying to figure out – am I going to get enough discharges today to be able to get these patients in? We have another COVID patient, but I don’t have another COVID bed – where can I put this patient? I have people from outside facilities having sick intubated COVID patients – they need to come here to a higher level of care. I don’t have a bed. How do we make this happen?

A lot of times we couldn’t get the patients here. And that was heartbreaking for all of us working as supervisors – it was really difficult. 

Karen Neis, Administrative Nursing Supervisor

I was on for the first COVID death – a 49 year old. I didn’t have enough staff that night, and I don’t normally work nights, but I stayed on. And that was our very first code. To Skype in a family crying miserably because they’re losing a 49 year old family member to COVID – that was so very difficult. It was so hard. We held the hands of the patient, we were the family that was here with that patient. And we became that family for multiple other patients that died throughout this journey as well. We held the patients’ hands and the families got to watch on cameras as they said their last goodbyes.

I don’t think you can ever imagine what we went through without walking the journey along beside us. You can tell people what it’s like, but they can’t envision it. They have no clue what it was like to be there. And the pain of losing so many people, it was devastating. I’ve been a nurse for 42 years. To experience a pandemic like this was something I never envisioned in my whole entire career. But I’m glad I was part of it. I just want to say how proud I am of this organization, how proud I was to walk the journey that I’ve been on. And my heart will feel it forever.