A Chronicle of “Heartaches and Small Victories”

May 21, 2020 | Stories of Strength

From left: Trish Campbell, RN; Jocelyn Sese, MSN, RN; Lauren Fernald-Colavita, RN; Kerrin Sleeper, RN; Satchell-Lee Tyrell, RN; and Jovy Castillon, RN.

Jocelyn Sese, MSN, RN, Director of Patient Care Services at Mount Sinai Morningside, has been keeping a blog, called COVID-19 Diary: The Heartaches and the Small Victories. “This is not just my story,” she writes. “This is also a snapshot of my department’s journey through a pandemic, with all the heartaches and the small victories. Nobody comes out of this war unscathed.” Here are some excerpts:

January 25: China is far away; the danger of the coronavirus that devastated Wuhan is far away. (Or so, I thought). The hospital cautions us to prepare, but there is a general sense that it’s just like the flu. The CDC says that the flu killed more people than the Wuhan virus. I thought, we’re safe here in America. Hey, even POTUS downplayed Wuhan. Life goes on.

February 28: We received about three patients with fevers, cough, positive travel history and they were just mildly sick. It’s not bad, I assured myself, I assured my staff. Who was I kidding? I was scared.

March 15: It’s a Saturday spent at work. The Emergency Department is getting overcrowded with patients worried about their symptoms. We have the worried wells, but there are more patients coming with respiratory distress. We opened the ambulatory clinic on the second floor with the physician assistants and ambulatory clinic staff seeing those with mild-acuity symptoms. The ED leadership had a nice plan on how we will surge up: We meant to start allocating some rooms for COVID patients in the Main ED for Phase 1, then will advance to Phase 2 with additional rooms that can hold the COVID patients, then Phase 3 using Pediatrics and Eval. It’s only Saturday, and we’re already in Phase 2. Out of the 30 boarders in the ED, only two were not COVID. Now we see patients presenting with abdominal pains and testing positive for COVID.

It was a long, tiring day. I ordered pizza for the staff, and they all came running to the conference room. I sat down to eat my ham with pineapple pizza pie, but did not have the strength to finish the whole thing. I had the feeling that things are going to get worse, then worst, before it becomes better. May God bless us all.

Emergency Department RNs, from left, Sharon Lafferty, Madeleine Rattray, Larissa Leonardo, Kerrin Sleeper, and Corina Wolfer.

March 20: I am the nursing director, but I do not do direct bedside care like these brave men and women do. But I sure do my very best to support them, securing more staff, more equipment, more supplies. I spend 10 to 12 hours in the hospital five days a week, and then I’m on call for any emergencies. The nursing directors are conducting Incident Management huddles at 8:30 am, even on Saturdays and Sundays. Even with all of these, it will certainly not compare with the higher risk that the bedside staff face every single day.

I am both proud of and worried for the all the direct-care providers, the nurses, doctors, techs, respiratory therapists. Both the front liners and the last recourse. They deserve all the glory and all the tributes for a job well done and for what they keep on doing. These are dark times, and the staff just keeps on rallying on in the middle of the war against COVID-19. They are awesome, so inspiring.

April 3: It’s the worst of times, but I see the staff stepping up. A physician assistant brought an iPad to the room so the patient and the self-quarantined family can talk to each other. The doctors slumped on their seats as they held their phones to their ears, as they fielded questions from the worried families. The nurses and techs gowned up to prepare a patient to the morgue. At 3pm, the techs gathered around after huddle to say their prayers. They are the heroes of these uncertain times. And to survive, I see them supporting and being kind to each other.

April 5: It takes courage to go where nobody else wants to go. It takes dedication to leave our families behind. It takes resilience to bounce back from a shift of heartaches and frustration to come back another day. It takes someone special and amazing to be in the front lines of this war. The nurse represents ALL the health care workers in the middle of this fight against COVID. Kudos to all the nurses, doctors, PAs, NPs, techs, registrars, respiratory therapists, transporters, EMS workers, Security, EVS workers, engineering, IT support, and all the administrative leadership staff who work behind the scenes.

April 10: I am glad I was able to witness a patient’s discharge; he is a COVID survivor. The patient broke into a wide grin as he was met with a chorus of well-wishes and boisterous applause at the #MountSinaiMorningside lobby. It is an honor and privilege to be among a group of people who cheered this patient. Much as he appreciated the warm send-off, I felt similarly blessed. It was a great feeling, a much-needed pick-me-up. There was encouraging news about the downward trending admission rates, but I couldn’t shake a lingering sadness earlier because of some losses of people I know. At that moment, I was energized, I felt joyful seeing the patient’s grateful smile. I caught his eyes, and I felt my own tears fall as he mouthed. “Thank You.” I never took care of him, but he was everybody’s patient at that time. Sir, Thank you.

The team at Mount Sinai Morningside was saluted by firefighters and other first responders.

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Fellowship, Compassion, and Support Bond the Mount Sinai Queens Family

May 15, 2020 | Stories of Strength

Caption: Rachelle Zazzu, the chaplain at Mount Sinai Queens

The borough of Queens was hit particularly hard with COVID-19, and at Mount Sinai Queens we felt it from pillar to post. Fundamentally we were 99 percent COVID with almost double our normal census. I am the lone Chaplain at MSQ.

In the middle of the panic, fear, and confusion was a depth of fellowship, compassion, and support that I will remember all my life. And I have been a minister in my church for 35 years and working with spiritual support in hospitals for more than 30 of them.

We often say that at Mount Sinai Queens we are a family. It’s a statement that in many ways the staff uses to distinguish ourselves within the Health System. And never was that more true than during the past few months. It’s true that I was called on for prayer/spiritual/emotional and psychosocial support in more profound and encompassing ways. It’s also true that this was a collaboration more than a bestowal. The staff at MSQ are here for each other, here for the patient, and here for the patients’ families in ways that could bring me to my knees in gratitude.

During this time, our Palliative Care team, our ICU/IMCU teams, our respiratory therapists and our Emergency Department staff rose to the occasion magnificently. One of our nurse practitioners held the head of one of our patients as he expired. Our Palliative Care team members went into COVID-19 rooms with iPads for family members. I held bedside memorials for both parents of one of our staff members who died within a week of each other. The staff member’s entire team was also suited up in the room.

I’m glad the first wave is behind us. In addition to being the only Chaplain here, I am the caregiver for a parent with a progressive lung disease. It has been a hard road to hoe but my faith is strong, our staff is strong, the sense of family is strong, and our spirit is indomitable.

Submitted by Rachelle Zazzu, Chaplain, Mount Sinai Queens

Volunteering Their Time and Hearts to Share a Heavy Burden

May 15, 2020 | Stories of Strength

Some of the Companion Program team members, from left: Maureen Bellare, PA; Chloe Connolly, PA; Brianna Gearty, PA; Kristen Thoelen, PA; Erin Walter, PA; Carrie Fuller, PTA; and Deena Hoffman, PA.

Maureen Bellare, PA, in the Department of Orthopedics at Mount Sinai West, and her colleagues were discussing their experiences with patients dying alone—families feeling helpless that they could not be with loved ones and nurses carrying the burden of this challenge. They all wanted to help, so Maureen suggested to Palliative Care that an End of Life Companion Program be created with the help of her peers. Maureen’s team, which consists of orthopedics and medicine PAs, as well as physical and occupational therapists, obtains referrals from Hospice Care to identify patients who are at the end of life, and the team makes themselves available 24/7 to be a presence at the bedsides of these patients, ensuring they do not die alone.

Members of the team will enter a patient’s room, hold his or her hand, play the patient’s favorite music, say a prayer, and connect family members using Zoom so they can say good-bye to their loved one. They will spend about an hour with the patient, sometimes longer, until a patient passes. The End of Life Companion Program helps ease the burden on nursing, comforts families, and most of all provides our dying patients a sense of dignity. I appreciate Maureen and her colleagues for recognizing the great work our nurses have been doing and volunteering their time and hearts to share the burden…a testament that this is truly one team, one fight.

Submitted by: Jennifer Jaromahum, RN, Deputy Chief Nursing Officer, Mount Sinai West

Away From His Clinical Home, a Physician Finds Himself Among Family

May 15, 2020 | Stories of Strength

Jay Dubowsky, MD

I did my medical training in New York, at an inner-city hospital. I trained in the time of HIV/AIDS. I was in the hospital during the riots in Brooklyn, the first and second Twin Tower bombings, and their aftermath. I thought I had seen it all. And then came COVID-19. Treating COVID-19 patients created challenges I had never imagined. And it created opportunities I never considered.

During the height of the pandemic, I was deployed from my clinical practice to a COVID-19 ICU at Mount Sinai South Nassau. I was out of my element, away from the comforts of my clinical practice, and in the intensity of COVID-19 Critical Care. At first, I felt alone. But I soon discovered I was one of a group of professionals gathered to care for Mount Sinai’s COVID-19 patients.

We quickly became a close-knit team. Our strengths merged to make us more effective than any individual alone. There were doctors, nurse practitioners and physician assistants, nurses and techs from every department at MSSN. They came from other practices and hospitals in the Mount Sinai Health System. And there were specialists from other health care systems less hard-hit by COVID-19.

We bonded over the patients. We bonded over patient care. We bonded over the families who were unable to see their ill loved ones. We became the patients’ families. We held their hands, stroked their heads, and held iPad tablets so the families could see their loved ones. We bonded over meals generously provided by the community. We celebrated patient successes, their triumphant extubations, and their long-anticipated discharges. And we mourned their deaths, as one of our own.
We all came together as a Mount Sinai family.

Submitted by: Jay Dubowsky, MD, Mount Sinai Doctors-Manhasset, Assistant Professor, Cardiology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Making Face Masks for Colleagues Near and Far

May 15, 2020 | Stories of Strength

Christine Brower has helped make and donate more than 500 masks.

A few weeks before Governor Cuomo announced that New Yorkers would be required to wear face masks out in public due to the pandemic, Christine Brower, Executive Assistant, Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics, and her family, including her Aunt Lena, sister Camille, and young niece Sofia, were already hard at work making face masks for the Sew You Care Project, a Facebook group created to help supply first responders, essential workers, immunocompromised families, and nursing homes all over the nation with requests for cloth face masks.

They spent hours of their personal time in the evenings and on weekends helping to help meet the rising demand for face coverings and preserve authorized personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers who need it. Once the Governor required face coverings in New York, Chris reached out to Lisa Satlin, MD, Chair of the Department of Pediatrics; Jessica Reid-Adam, MD, Pediatric Residency Program Director; and Steven Yung, MD, Medical Director of Quality Improvement and Safety Services, to offer mask donations to her colleagues for personal use outside of the hospital.

“It was never a question of ‘should we do this?’ It was an affirmation that ‘We absolutely need to do this.’ This is the right thing to do and whatever it takes to get the job done,” Chris says.  “It’s a skill and talent we are all graced with, so it is our duty to help. Our doctors, nurses, residents, support staff, and so many other colleagues are putting their lives on the line for us, this small gesture is the least we can do to help ease a little anxiety for them while they are traveling to and from work at the hospital.”

The group creates 30 to 50 masks per week, and Chris packages them individually and includes a special note with each one, thanking our “Health Care Heroes and Heroines” for helping to save the lives of the people of “Gotham City.” So far they have made and donated more than 500 masks and are still going strong in an effort to support as many across the nation as possible.

“I think the most important message we want to share is that we want our health care workers to know that they are not alone, we are all in this together,“ Chris says.

The colorful and creative masks are meant for personal use outside the hospital.

Submitted by Carla Monaco, Associate Director, Marketing, Department of Pediatrics

Transporters Show Great Agility, Empathy, and Teamwork in Uncertain Times

May 14, 2020 | Stories of Strength

Andre Cooper, left, and Rafael Miranda

Andre Cooper and Rafael Miranda were the first transporters at Mount Sinai Morningside to take a COVID-19 patient under investigation (PUI) from the Emergency Department to an in-patient unit. It was a very scary time at the onset of the pandemic, and these two fearless individuals volunteered to perform a task that we had only begun to figure out. Rafael displayed AGILITY, when he asked for a disposable razor and without hesitation shaved off his facial hair in order to be fitted for the N-95 mask for this transport. Andre and Rafael both displayed EMPATHY, and showed great compassion while still feeling a lot of uncertainty about how the virus spreads. They engaged and reassured the patient and treated her just as they treat every other patient. This was the ultimate display of TEAMWORK, because they worked together with clinical staff to safely and quickly transport the patient during a very stressful time at the hospital. Their actions are beyond commendable.

Submitted by
Ruby Guzman
Director, Transport Department
Mount Sinai Morningside

Transporter team members at Mount Sinai Morningside.

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