This post was written based on an interview with Prudy Moore, RRT, Cardiopulmonary, Parkview Regional Medical Center, who will celebrate 39 years as a respiratory therapist with the health system in September. She reflects on the changes she’s seen over the span of her career and the challenges presented in the last two years, in particular.
Right after high school, I was going to go into the U.S. Air Force to work on jets. I passed the test – which was really hard – and scored high in mechanics. So, I drove down to Indianapolis to do the physical and get sworn in. As I stood outside of the room, something in my being told me this just wasn’t right for me. I asked if I could come back to be sworn in, and the recruiter said I could. I never went back.
That summer, my grandmother got pneumonia. As I watched the respiratory therapists care for her, I realized that the field was something I’d like to do. I was so impressed with the different therapies and the mechanics of the breathing treatments. In the fall of 1982, I was accepted into respiratory school at Ivy Tech Fort Wayne. They only admitted 21 people into the program, which was one year at the time. After my clinicals, I knew I wanted to be at Parkview.
Joining the Parkview family
I’ve only had two jobs in my entire life, McDonald’s and Parkview. I started with the latter in 1983 as a certified respiratory therapist (CRT).
Back then, they put me in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) right away. I worked everywhere … doing breathing treatments and intubations wherever I was assigned or they needed me. I wasn’t picky. I liked every aspect of the job, but particularly taking care of children. I still gravitate toward pediatrics.
In 1996, Parkview created a Senior Therapist position, so I went back to school to become a Registered Respiratory Therapist (RRT).
COVID uncertainty and exhaustion
I’d been battling a bad hip for years. I could barely walk and was in so much pain, but in order to get the surgery I needed, I had to lose some weight. In February 2020, I hit my goal and the surgery was scheduled for March 24. When COVID hit, they had to push back my procedure to May. I was not in a good place mentally.
At the time, I just couldn’t understand. I remembered a terrible flu season in 2018, when we had to look at cases a week out and make decisions about capacity and safety. We only had a few COVID cases in the state and I just wanted the surgery so badly. I couldn’t understand the magnitude of what was coming.
On the clinical side, our biggest concerns initially were PPE and just the uncertainty of the virus. I’d worked through H1N1 in 2009 and swine flu in 2013 and the influenza A H3N2 surge in 2018, but this took me back to HIV and AIDS in the ‘80s, early in my career. We didn’t know how it spread and there was so much fear around how people would contract the disease and potentially die from it. I remember questioning whether I could do this job back then. Wondering if I was at risk. The early days of COVID were similar.
I left to have my hip replacement in May 2020 and returned to Randallia in July of that year. In April 2021, I transitioned over to Parkview Regional Medical Center. When I came back, I had a lot of questions. I needed to know the proper way to do things and make sure I got it right.
Some of the younger team members didn’t know anything outside of the pandemic, but I certainly did. We were already seeing staffing challenges, and when the Delta variant first hit, we were seeing numbers I hadn’t experienced in my whole career. It was so much worse than the first wave. You just worked and worked and never sat down. We would go from bed to bed to bed, proning (turning patients) and starting medications. There were just so many patients.
I'm very strong and I never get excited, so if you see me worked up, it's bad. There were times when, a few times a day, I'd break down crying in the unit. These people with COVID were so sick and they needed us, but we could only do so much. We would intubate as many as seven patients in a four-hour period. That’s a lot. I couldn’t help but carry that stress. Sometimes it just felt like it would never stop.
Over the years I've stopped bringing it home, which is a learned behavior. You just can’t carry it all into your personal life. I will say it's been hard physically. There’ve been so many times in the past few years I’ve wished I was 20 years younger and 80 pounds lighter, but you keep doing what you can and taking care of the patients who need you.
Taking stock
The most rewarding part of the pandemic has been the times we get to see a patient come off the ventilator and get the opportunity to rehab. To see them pull through is such a gift, because being ventilated is so tough on the body and the rehab journey is long.
It tears you up, when we talk to their family, or they are, as we're setting up, not sure the patient will make it off the vent. You know how difficult the days to come are going to be for them. The only thing you can do, and I’m going to get emotional here, is hold their hand and tell them we’re going to take the best care of them that we can and make them comfortable. It’s honest, but it’s the hardest part.
By the time I retire, I hope we can have even better outcomes. We’ve seen adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in the past, but not to this scale. The strange thing about COVID is that the patient can be sitting there, not in distress, but their saturations are low so they’re maxed out at 100% oxygen. It’s mind-blowing. COVID has been a different ballgame.
People think of respiratory therapists as doing breathing treatments, and we do, but there’s so much more to this job. I'm the one turning off the ventilator. I'm the one pulling the breathing tube and telling the family “I'm sorry.” COVID has meant more of doing that. Seeing more people die.
It’s taken an emotional toll for so many reasons, but no matter what, when we’re at work, our main focus is that patient in the bed. You are important to me because you are a human being, and you deserve whatever we can do. Compassion is what drives us as caregivers.
I have done every aspect of what I could do within my field. I’ve worked staff, senior therapist, flight therapist, CRT, RRT, adult specialist and supervisor. I always planned to retire at 62 and that's what I'll do. There were times over the past two years when I questioned what I was doing, but I love this work. I know who I am. I have a servant’s heart and I will skip lunch to make sure a patient gets the highest level of care. I just have to get it all done and help as many people as I can.