Feature

A Health Care Worker’s Take on COVID-19

A local nurse shares some insites into the realities of the Covid-10 pandemic

Reporter Colleen Brownley

On April 24th, I sat down with Cynthia Brownley, a Registered Nurse at Riverside Walter Reed Hospital. Throughout the course of this pandemic, nurses and doctors have been showered with praise and gratitude because we need them more than ever now.

Cynthia currently provides care for coronavirus patients at the hospital and told me about how the workers take care of them, and how they remain safe themselves. She detailed the nurses’ protective wear, which includes “goggles, a respirator, a face shield, an isolation gown, and two pairs of gloves.” When it comes to treating a COVID-19 patient, Cynthia says “it depends on the severity of their symptoms.” If a patient has severe symptoms, they will prone the medical workers and the patient for 18 hours. She explained that proning is where you lay the patient “on their stomach” which “helps with lung expansion” and is something they “don’t do with almost anything else.”

Professionals are just as bewildered by this disease as everyone else. When I asked Cynthia how long she thinks this is going to last, she told me she honestly doesn’t know. She believes that if “we open up nonessentials like movie theaters and restaurants and people don’t continue with social distancing, we would have a more rapid increase” of deaths and cases in Gloucester.

When someone gets tested for COVID-19 it takes a pretty long amount of time for the results to come back, three to seven days to be exact. Nurses and doctors rule out other possibilities and explore other methods to give patients some guidance during that time. Cynthia says “we get a chest x-ray, and if that’s still negative we get a CAT scan of their chest.” What they are looking for in these CAT scans is bilateral ground-glass opacities, something that appears in few other diseases. After a test comes back positive, they proceed to test any others who came in close contact with the patient. This includes nurses, doctors, and family members.

This pandemic is just as scary to medical professionals as it is to civilians. Without a cure or a vaccine, we need to stay inside and social distance to ensure the safety of our community.