FORT WALTON BEACH — As everyone else hid from COVID-19 to protect their own health, Demetra Ransom ran toward it to help protect the health of others.
The Fort Walton Beach nurse positioned herself at the epicenter of the outbreak in New York, taking a seven-week contract at Queens Hospital Center to help treat COVID-19 patients. At the time, Okaloosa County only had one confirmed case, but New York had tons, she said.
“It’s what we do – we’re nurses,” Ransom said. “We don’t run away; we go to. It was the natural order of things, the natural, ‘Yep, somebody out there is sick. We’ve gotta go help them.’”
The patients weren’t the only people who needed help.
“You know your fellow nurses, we knew they were drowning,” Ransom said. “If you have been a nurse for any amount of time, you know our nurse-to-patient ratios are already low enough – especially in the South. Just working on the regular floor, not having a pandemic, dealing with regular illnesses, we’re already strained and stressed. We knew going to New York, those nurses needed help. There’s no way they could’ve done that without a lot of us showing up.”
When Ransom arrived alongside other nurses from all over the country, they were greeted like the second cavalry coming into save a losing battle.
And it was a battle.
“It’s what I would think it’s like going to Iraq or Iran in the middle of war – I liken it to that,” Ransom said. “It was just the magnitude of sick and dying people. You’re standing in the middle of them and you’re doing all that you can do. Ninety-percent of the time what you could do was not going to be enough.”
Ransom wasn’t watching the news anymore to hear about it; she was already living it.
“Everything you see on the news, we’d see it before you would see it on the news,” Ransom said. “We just spent the night in the ER. We know those were the things people were complaining of. I’d get up the next morning and the news would be reporting the things we already knew. For some reason, we had a lot of blood clots, the shortness of breath, the trouble tasting.”
The hospital housed 300 beds under normal situations. Ransom estimates it held about three to five times its capacity while she was there.
People died constantly, Ransom said.
“Just about everybody died – that’s how it felt,” Ransom said. “The first few weeks I went down, I was in the ER, the emergency room. A lot of those people never even made it upstairs. When you’re counting deaths, a lot of those people didn’t even make it to the floors, up to the bed. You’d just turn around and look back and they’d be dead.”
There wasn’t much time between life and death, Ransom said. She thinks many sought health care too late.
“In the first part of the pandemic, we told people to stay at home, try not to come to the hospital unless they were feeling like they were dying,” Ransom said. “I think a lot of people followed those instructions – they were afraid to come to the hospital – and in a lot of cases, by the time they got there, it was too late.”
Ransom had a breath of victory, though, with one patient who left the hospital. VICE News interviewed her for a video segment about the patient.
“The hospitals decided instead of harping on death we were going to start celebrating life,” Ransom said. “For each COVID patient who left the hospital, there was this big celebration. I only did it once.
“He was the only one that came off of a ventilator,” she added. “He’d been on that maybe 29 or 30 days and he’s 70, 60-something years old. It was a miracle. Of all people, you wouldn’t have thought it would be him. When he got to go home, it was like our hard work and efforts had paid off. This was toward the end of our stay.”
Ransom spent her last month in New York in the intensive care unit.
While Ransom watched people suffer and die, the hardest part was leaving, she said.
“You just felt like there was more to be done,” Ransom said. “You watch these people and you feel invested. You want to know how it turned out for them. We worked hard to try to keep this people alive and all of a sudden, your contract’s up and it’s time for you to go.”
As the numbers of COVID-19 patients decreased, healthcare facilities sent staff home, still remaining short-staffed, Ransom said. Although Ransom has three children – who were all worried about her – it was hard to come home.
“I don’t use the term PTSD, because I don’t think I have PTSD at all; I just think it changed how I view nursing,” Ransom said. “It changed the order of importance of things in life to me. The ones of us who stayed that long – a lot of people couldn’t take it, a lot of nurses went home early – we all just agreed it was going to be very difficult to go back to your everyday bedside nursing.”
Ransom came home, cleaned her house and self-quarantined for 14 days. Then, she got her hair done.
“I go to the beauty parlor and one of the beauticians there is telling me, ‘I heard that those bodies were just mannequins and they were just making it up,’” Ransom said. “If I had something to tell people, those are not mannequins. Those are real bodies. And I know the difference. They need to protect themselves – especially the elderly, people with diabetes, if you’re overweight – they do not do well with this.”
Yes, Ransom was home for a spell – until she heard about an outbreak in Montgomery, Alabama.
She did what nurses do.
“My family was very, very upset and nervous,” Ransom said. “I always tell them the same thing, ‘Don’t worry about me. Just worry about these people I’m going to care for. I’ll be fine.’”
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Northwest Florida nurse goes to New York, Alabama to help treat COVID-19 patients - Pensacola News Journal
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