The Work We Do Registered Nurses RN is shorthand for trust. Nurses regularly poll as one of the most trusted professions in America. COVID-19 has borne out that truth. Over the last year, the maskmarked, exhausted yet determined faces of nurses and their frontline team members came to symbolize the unrelenting fight against the pandemic. At press time, COVID-19 deaths were down, and vaccination rates were on the rise, but hospitalizations and case numbers were ticking up. 1199 Magazine
spoke with some of our New York City RNs about their experiences a year into the pandemic. Brookdale RN Ursula Edwards says that seeing more people get vaccinated and recover has been central to her moving on from the pandemic’s dark, early days. “It’s definitely helped my recovery,” she says. “Working on with the vaccination team is such a great environment. We put on music and sing and laugh. It’s wonderful getting to spend time with our patients that way.”
1. Iona Folkes treated the first COVID-19 patient at St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Queens, NY, where she has worked for the last 30 years. Folkes has been an outspoken advocate for her institution and her community. (See story about the fight for St. John’s Episcopal on page 17.) “When [COVID-19] first came on our radar, the nurses realized we were dealing with something different—that was before we had any guidelines or protocols from the CDC,” says Folkes. “I was not frightened because when you work in the ER you see things. And we’d had pandemic training during the Ebola crisis, so we were still in that mindset.”
taking a pause. When I go home, I do some meditation. Even when the prognosis is that someone is unlikely to improve, you always have that hope. You never really get used to losing someone.”
2. New York-Presbyterian Queens RN Vanessa Benjamin says the recent loss of two of longterm COVID-19 patients was particularly difficult. Numbers may be down, but patients are still dying. “You always ask what you could have done better. It never gets easier,” she says. “I cope by
4. Emergency Department RN Angela Sanchez started her nursing career as an LPN at Brookdale Medical Center’s Schulman and Schachne Institute for Nursing and Rehabilitation. Through the 1199 Training and Employment Program, Sanchez went back to school and in 2009 earned her
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3. Ursula Edwards works in the cardiac catheterization lab at Brookdale Medical Center in Brooklyn, NY. She’s also on the hospital’s vaccination team. “I help coordinate the nurses,” she says. “We have been vaccinating East Brownsville and other communities in Central Brooklyn. It’s such a different environment [than last year] and it’s a great experience. People are so grateful. They’re smiling and happy to be there.”
nursing degree. Over her career at the hospital, she has worked ono many units. The experiences have given her appreciation for Brookdale’s importance to the residents of central Brooklyn. “But for the fact that Brookdale exists, many people would suffer,” she says. “I see a lot of kids and if we weren’t here many folks would not be able to get any healthcare.” 5. Sybilla Daniel Douglas has been an RN at Brookdale since 1990.She works in the hospital’s outpatient ambulatory care clinic, the Brookdale Family Care Center. Daniel Douglas has also been working at Brookdale’s COVID-19 vaccination clinic. “I really want to say things are changing,” she says. “But one thing I can say for sure is that the patients we are seeing aren’t as sick and we don’t have the same number of hospitalizations. We are really trying to make sure that everyone is vaccinated. I’m working to bring a vaccine program to my site at the Family Clinic.”