Clarice Shen just 3 months after her new career at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center when she was assigned to care for the first COVID-19 patient in Canada.
At the time, it was a mysterious disease. Many still know it as the “Wuhan virus” because much less is known about it, and much of the media policy in this regard is still leaking out of China.
Eight months later, there were approximately 150,000 in Canada and more than 9,200 deaths.
“On TV . . . I basically see doctors and nurses in dangerous tissue cover suits,” Shen recalls.
“They just lived those who looked like days when they were trapped in a suite for 12 hours or who knows how long. “
It was on January 23 that Shen took care of the 56-year-old man, who had recently returned from Wuhan, China, and was working as a member of Sunnybrook’s acute care nursing resources team.
At the beginning of his shift, he reviewed his to-do list for the night, noticed some patients and an access he had never noticed before: a locked bed. He turned to his supervisor, asked for clarification and told him it would be the designated bed in the hospital for a potential coronavirus patient.
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Around midnight, a call arrived from the emergency office informing them that a male patient with imaginable symptoms was admitted and would remain in this negative strain isolation room.
“We already have all our equipment, gloves, blouse, face shield, N95, so I wasn’t a stranger with the whole team,” Shen recalls.
“But because this virus is so new, we don’t know how it spreads. “
Nearly after the emergency call, Shen said the hospital team leader had arrived.
“You rarely see the team leader walk into his unit at night unless something happens. “
He’s looking for the nurse assigned to the room.
Shen temporarily reported on the patient’s identity that she would soon be in her care and subjected to isolation procedures and how to protect he or she. He admitted some nervousness when he first learned that a patient was admitted, but that feeling temporarily diminished.
It turned out that Shen’s patient spoke Mandarin, a language she spoke fluently.
“Maybe there wasn’t an emergency nurse who could just communicate with him, so he felt very lonely, remote and scared,” he said.
“I was able to keep him up to date, leave him on the floor and tell him he was safe, that we were going to take care of him.
It has been shown as “presumptive. “
Shen scheduled to paint three more shifts this week. She said she contacted her manager and volunteered to continue caring for her.
Shen, who has a history of asthma, several factors.
“I was like, ‘Well, I’m young. There might be a chance she wouldn’t be in very poor health and at the same time live alone,” she recalls.
Your patient recovered. His wife was the user of the time in Canada to contract the virus.