HONORS HEALTHCARE HEROES
Christine Boyd, RN in the Labor and
Delivery Unit at NYU Langone Hospital
— Long Island. Photo credit: NYU
Langone Hospital — Long Island
Healthcare workers cloaked in hazmat suits at a ProHEALTH COVID-19 testing
site. Photo credit: ProHEALTH Urgent Care
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Staff also distributed educational
and instructional packets with updated
information on COVID.
At a time of great fear and uncertainty,
“We provided a sense of relief
in the community because many of
the patients did not understand how to
process major changes in their daily life
activities,” added Patel.
BEST MATERNITY
WARD
NYU LANGONE HOSPITAL
PRESERVES THE MIRACLE
OF CHILDBIRTH
Healthcare heroes at NYU Langone
Hospital—Long Island also saw
their responsibilities change practically
overnight, particularly in Labor and
Delivery.
During the height of the pandemic,
Catherine Bell, a nurse manager in Labor
and Delivery, led her team in the
care of acute, adult COVID patients
when one side of the mother/baby unit
was converted to an adult unit. She also
managed the other half of the unit with
moms and babies. Bell says that the
patients in Labor and Delivery/maternity
units are typically healthy women
of childbearing age, hence the nursing
responsibilities and experiences were
also drastically different than in other
areas pre-COVID.
“Our population of patients is very
unique,” she said. “They are healthy—
they had a baby, they have needs, and
we have to take care of them—but they
are not sick. It is a very different type
of nursing than that of other nurses in
other areas.”
Nurses were confronted with horrific
experiences that most of them had
never encountered, Bell said.
“I have been doing mother-baby
maternity, labor and delivery for 36
years,” she said. “That’s all I know.”
Bell added that most of the nurses
she worked with share similar work
histories. The night that her unit was
converted was one she will never forget.
Bell received a phone call from a nurse
at 12:30am one morning in March.
“The nurse said ‘Cathy, it’s happening,’”
she recalled. “It went from
zero population to every room was
full. Within hours, I went from talking
about breasts, lactating, and breastfeeding
to, ‘Wait, how old is this woman?
She’s 92.’”
Bell recalls having conversations
with patients in one moment and then
suddenly needing to call rapid response,
thinking they had to be intubated.
Within a few days of the conversion,
“we had our first death,” Bell said.
To a unit of labor and delivery/maternity
nurses, the entire experience was
“shocking,” Bell said.
“Our unit is primarily a happy
place,” she said. “We have the babies.
We have the moms.”
Bell said she and the other nurses
stood strong and carried their patients
and each other through the process.
She assured her staff she was right there
with them and that they could count
on her to work alongside them. For her
abor and Delivery patients, she and the
other nurses worked wholeheartedly
and truly were amazing in helping to
maintain a sense of normalcy for an
optimal and special birth experience
in spite of all the changes and looming
fear in the hospital.
“Every day, we learned something
new,” said Christine Boyd, registered
nurse. “We had to stay on top of everything.
If mom was positive, the baby
went to the pediatric floor and the
mom would stay in the hospital. We
were discharging after 24 hours after
delivery, 48 hours for a c-section.”
Most mothers, if cleared, couldn’t
wait to go home.
“There were sick moms and there
were moms that got vented,” Boyd said.
“We tested every single mother right
when they came in.”
Hospital staff are still testing, Boyd
noted.
“It was a different way of doing the
delivery with the couple but we made it
work,” Boyd said, adding that for husbands
or other support persons that
could not be present in the delivery
room, they would FaceTime.
Patients were scared. Boyd says
nurses provided additional comfort
and support to ease their fears.
“That moment your child being
born— you can’t get that back, and I
didn’t want it to be panic,” she said. “We
didn’t want them to lose out on a most
memorable experience.”
Boyd recalled one patient who was
on a ventilator when her baby was delivered
preterm.
“It was very hard to think, ‘Was she
going to wake up and see her child?
Was the child going to see her mother?’”
Thankfully, this family’s story had
a happy ending,” said Boyd. About one
week following the baby’s birth, “they
brought me to the NICU when the
mom was holding the baby and I got
to be there when she was discharged
home.”
Boyd was overwhelmed with joy.
“I was just so happy, I started to cry
happy tears,” she recalled. “To see her
awake and holding her baby was pretty
amazing and I know it was the work of
the entire hospital from the NICU staff
to the ICU staff to the residents, the attendings,
anastasis—everybody.”
Healthcare heroes agree that it was
these types of success stories, the support
of their respective medical care
institutions, as well as the outpouring
of community support that helped
them persevere and do their jobs.
Gratitude was felt everywhere, Boyd
recalled.
“We could feel the support of the
community on the outside, too,” she
said. “There were people with signs
thanking us and it was so appreciated
to have that support.”
Parents Justine and Rich DeJoseph welcome their baby at NYU Langone
Hospital — Long Island. Photo Credit: NYU Langone Hospital — Long Island