Interview with U.S. Navy Lt. Catharyn Nosek, a nurse working in the intensive care unit aboard the Military Sealift Command hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH 20)
- Hi, I'm lieutenant Catharyn Nosek. I'm from Greensboro, North Carolina. I'm currently stationed at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth, and I'm working aboard the USNS Comfort as one of the critical care nurses in the ICU.
My job responsibilities in the ICU is to provide care to the ICU patients that come aboard from New York City. That includes taking care of their medications, their ventilators, any other care that's needed on the ship.
Currently all the patients that we are taking care of in the ICU that I'm working in, are COVID positive patients. Most of them are on ventilators and they're very sick. This mission calls for a lot of team work and a lot of resiliency between each other.
I currently hold the role as a transport nurse, so while I still have patients on the ICU, I do leave the unit to go bring the patients on the ship. So, this requires my coworkers to cover the watch of my patients while I step off the floor to bring on new patients to the unit.
The logistics of getting a patient on board the USNS Comfort is very different than just walking into a regular hospital in through the ER, on ground level.
So, the process includes, again, a lot of team work, a lot of communication because we take the patient from the ambulance onto our gurney, and then we physically push the patient up the ramp to the ship.
The ramp is about a quarter of a mile and it's all uphill and it's back and forth. So, we're taking the patient up the ramp, turning sharp corners, and going back and forth in a zig-zag motion for about a quarter of a mile. And that's while we're pushing an adult patient on a ventilator with medical equipment. So, it requires a lot of physical labor and a lot of communication to make sure that we do it quickly but also safely.
So, generally the patients we see at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth are not quite as sick as these COVID patients that we see for obvious reasons. Our patient population in the military, luckily is generally healthy for the most part. So, we're experiencing a lot of challenges taking care of the local population here in New York City.
Just seeing what these local hospitals deal with on a daily basis, we're getting that on the ship as well. So, we're definitely ramping up our team work, our communication to provide the best care that we can.
When I get off work I try to decompress a little bit and reflect on what we saw during the shift and I'm letting my family and friends know that this is unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Again, in military medicine, our population is so different than what the outside civilian world sees. So, these are sicker patients they're requiring a lot more care, and I'm letting them know that we really are seeing what the New York hospitals are seeing, and we are working just as hard.
We're on our feet taking care of these sick patients. We've got patients lined up on ventilators that are very sick and need a lot of high-quality care. And luckily this is what we train for and we're absolutely ready for it.
So, a similar experience I've had in the military that has prepared me for this mission is a TAD experience I did last year to a level one trauma center at University of Florida Shands. It's for the hospital corpsman trauma training initiative where I was a preceptor or an instructor for 16 corpsmen going through a trauma program.
So, that allowed us to get civilian experience as well and see real trauma cases. We were seeing gunshot wounds, respiratory distress, strokes, a little but a little bit more to a higher acuity than we would see at Portsmouth or another large MTF in the Navy.
So, that experience definitely prepared me to deal with the civilian side of medicine and the sicker patients that we're seeing now. Staying motivated and staying positive is definitely a core part of what we're doing right now because you have to keep a positive attitude to keep going.
So, we're doing whatever we can to motivate each other. Remind each other of the mission at hand: that we're here for a greater good and that we are prepared for this. We're listening to music, we're ordering food to the hotel when we can to try to just build that camaraderie and build that morale.
It's very easy to get down and be exhausted. We've worked weeks and weeks without a day off, and we're all very tired, but we know that we're accomplishing good here. And the overall mission is to help the people of New York, and we're absolutely happy to be here to do that. And we're happy to be a part of this mission.