Editor’s note: The Gazette is working on a series profiling health care workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re trying to reach doctors, respiratory therapists, environmental service workers, certified nurse assistants and others. Please let us know if you would like to connect at newsroom@gazettenet.com.
NORTHAMPTON — After a shift lasting anywhere from nine to 12 hours, Emma Dragon, a nurse at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, comes home to Hadley. But before entering her house, she undergoes something of a transformation.
In her blue Honda Odyssey — a “classic mom van,” she called it, still equipped with car seats — Dragon changes into clean clothes, often pajama pants and a T-shirt, before she goes inside to see her husband, Kyle Dragon, and three kids, Reilly, 10, Maeghan, 4, and Charlie, 2.
“My kids are not allowed in my van. My van has become my COVID transport vehicle,” she said recently. “I just interpret it as contaminated … It’s just scary.”
After every shift, she leaves her shoes in the garage, runs upstairs to take a shower and puts her work clothes right into the washing machine.
At Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Dragon, 34, works mostly in behavioral health and does weekly shifts in the Emergency Department. She has been working at the hospital since 2011.
Dragon is used to being on the front lines of crises. When there’s a natural disaster or major emergency, she may be deployed to the scene for medical care through the Disaster Medical Assistance Team, a federal program that is separate from her job at Cooley Dickinson.
She went to Texas after Hurricane Harvey, the Florida Keys after Hurricane Irma, and Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. “Emergency nursing is my jam, if you will,” she said.
“I’m kind of used to the disaster stuff, but it’s usually hurricanes or tornadoes,” she continued. “Not a pandemic. It’s a totally different thing. I’ll deal with natural disasters all day long, but the thought of possibly getting an infection and dying is really scary.”
Before she shows up at the hospital, she must answer a series of questions through an online form — does she have a fever, new cough or other COVID-19 symptoms? It’s a necessary safety protocol that she said is anxiety-producing.
“Then they give us our one mask for the day — the surgical mask, not even the N95 mask,” she said. Nurses going into the rooms of patients with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 do get a N95 mask, she added.
Hospital spokeswoman Christina Trinchero confirmed in an email that in addition to N95 masks, nurses working with confirmed or suspected COVID-19 cases also get eye protection. All hospital employees, including nurses, receive a surgical or a procedural mask, she said.
“Before the pandemic, the standard of care was that masks (N95 and procedural masks) were worn one time: for one nurse going to see one patient one time,” Trinchero explained. “The nurse would come out of the room, and they throw away their mask.”
Hospitals across the country are experiencing a shortage of personal protective equipment.
“Collectively, we need to conserve N95 masks and ensure they are available for health care workers who perform high-risk procedures,” Trinchero said. “Cooley Dickinson’s policies meet or exceed the infection-control protocols set out by the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization.”
In the Emergency Department, Dragon hasn’t taken care of anyone who has tested positive for COVID-19, but she has helped people who have shown some of the symptoms and been suspected cases.
“I do worry because there have been health care providers in my age range that have died from this already,” Dragon said. Because she doesn’t have any major underlying health conditions, getting sick is not her most pressing concern. “I feel less worried about that than many of my peers who are feeling like they still have to go to work because they are the primary income,” she said.
The Emergency Department is seeing some of the sickest patients. “When people do come in, they are really sick and have very high fevers,” she said. “They are alone because we don’t have any visitors.”
On the behavioral health floor, the mask Dragon does wear complicates her work.
“So much of behavioral health nursing isn’t the tubes and lines and drips and all that stuff,” she said. “It’s how we interact with people. It’s making it really challenging to manage those patients.”
She added, “How much of human communication is body language and facial expressions? They can’t read that on our faces.”
The pandemic is a stressful time for people everywhere, including the patients Dragon interacts with on the behavioral health floor who have mental health issues such as chronic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression.
“Some are extremely paranoid,” she said. “Even when things were functioning normally, they would be worried … and guarded and frightened. Now it’s even more.”
As chair of the nurses’ union at Cooley Dickinson, Dragon often hears from co-workers about a range of issues. Recently, colleagues have contacted her, worried about exposing their families to the virus. “I’m getting messages from anywhere from five to 10 nurses a day with concerns and questions,” she said. “I feel lost. Because usually there’s some kind of good answer to give people.”
“It’s hard,” she continued, “when there isn’t an easy solution.”
Nurses and caregivers at state hospitals and state group homes will be receiving hazard pay in a deal struck between the union representing them and the commonwealth, State House News Service reported Monday. In the wake of that announcement, Dragon said she got dozens of texts from nurses asking about the possibility of Cooley Dickinson offering hazard pay, though they are not state employees.
“That is an amazing thing to strive for. I hope we all are able to get some kind of compensation in terms of the risk and the work we are doing,” she said, adding that there is extra emotional strain as well.
Partners HealthCare, a network that includes Cooley Dickinson Hospital, said it would not provide employees hazard pay, multiple news outlets reported earlier this month. “We do not calibrate pay and benefits based upon the patients’ conditions, and for this reason we do not offer hazard or crisis pay,” Trinchero said in an email.
Also according to Trinchero, Cooley Dickinson Hospital has not laid off or furloughed any employees and has told employees it would “guarantee wage protections for eight weeks.”
Before the pandemic, Dragon would pick up additional hours at the hospital, but now, like many other parents, she has another job at home: teaching.
“All of a sudden, I’m being a schoolteacher … which is not my specialty,” she said. Helping her 10-year-old son with math is particularly hard, she added: “The math — the math I can’t deal with.”
Her husband works for Highland Ambulance and the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office. Life is “a juggling match,” with both of them working and taking care of their kids who are home from school and day care.
“We had our normal busy schedule filled with Cub Scouts and taekwondo,” she said. “Now it’s this weird new chaotic schedule without those things.”
Dragon does get some quiet time. “The moment of solitude,” she said, “is grocery shopping by myself.”
Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.