Health-care workers: Central Florida’s troopers in the Battle of 2020 | Commentary
The first hints of trouble came as the New Year dawned. Pretty soon, a virus few had ever heard of turned the world upside down.
“It was like being at war,” said Dr. Herman Gaztambide-Rodriguez, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Health Central Hospital in Ocoee.
That war metaphor is often abused, but not in this case. The invasion of COVID-19 sparked the battle of 2020 that continues today.
There were body counts, economic carnage and incalculable emotional damage.
The fight also gave us heroes from occupations we take for granted, like grocery-store workers and truck drivers.
But no group was in the thick of it like health-care workers.
The Sentinel named emergency workers at Orlando Health the Central Floridians of the Year in 2016 for their response to the Pulse nightclub massacre.
Four years later, the area’s doctors, nurses and hospital staffs had to deal with another tragedy, one that seemed to have no end.
Their efforts to battle the virus and keep people alive at great personal risk is why the region’s health-care workers are finalists for the 2020 Central Floridians of the Year.
We can’t possibly name them all, but here are some glimpses into what they did for our region.
Confronting the unknown
From a human standpoint, there was nothing good about the pandemic. From an academic standpoint, it was an intriguing year to be a doctor.
They like a challenge, and nobody had seen one quite like COVID-19.
“There was excitement in figuring out what to do,” said Dr. Rebecca Gomez, a primary-care physician with AdventHealth Orlando.
The virus came on so fast nobody knew exactly how to treat it.
“The literature usually says this. The literature says that,” Gaztambide-Rodriguez said. “Here, there was no literature.”
Doctors around the globe got on Facebook and had the same questions for each other.
“What are you doing?” Gomez recalled. “What’s working? What treatments do you like?”
Italy quickly became the epicenter of the pandemic. Gaztambide-Rodriguez took part in a two-hour group call with an Italian physician.
“Seeing his face, and how tired it was,” Gaztambide-Rodriguez said. “That’s when things became very real.”
Treatment was an ever-evolving guessing game. Drugs like remdesivir looked promising. Hydroxychloroquine became politicized when President Trump called it a “game changer.”
Critically ill patients were usually intubated early on. Now doctors try to avoid mechanical ventilation.
“One thing that made this one different was it was easier to spread,” said Dr. Donald Elton, a pulmonary and critical-care physician. “You can spread it even if you don’t have symptoms.”
He works at Poinciana Medical Center, where the intensive care unit might have had a half-dozen or so respiratory cases at a time before the pandemic. That number quickly tripled.
Elton estimates he saw 600 to 700 COVID-19 patients since March, and he works at a mid-sized hospital. Larger ones like Orlando Regional Medical Center and AdventHealth Orlando had to expand their ICUs to handle the load.
The questions about transmission did not end when doctors went home from work.
“Do I need to strip down in the garage? What do I do with my shoes?” wondered Gomez, who had a husband and two children at home.
Some health-care workers stayed in the hotels, which were eerily empty after the theme parks closed. Gomez just dumped all her clothes in the washing machine when she got home and made a beeline for the shower.
She’d grab a few hours of sleep before going back to trying to solve the treatment puzzle.
As intriguing as 2020 was from an academic standpoint, the real excitement came when they could send a healthy patient home.
“Just being in a position to take care of people and get them through this,” Gomez said. “That’s something I wanted to do.”
A new life, a new fight
Rachelle Valerice thought she could ease into her new life. She’d just gotten married before moving to Orlando to take a job at ORMC.
The 24-year-old started as a respiratory therapist in February. A few days into the job, Valerice heard rumblings of a new virus.
“I didn’t know what it was or the seriousness of it,” she said. “No one expected it to be like this.”
Instead of tending to three or four patients a day in the ICU, Valerice would tend to a dozen or more. The major task was “proning,” where patients are turned onto their stomachs so their lungs can expand.
What might sound simple becomes a complex undertaking with a critically ill patient. At least a half-dozen people must slowly rotate the patient using precise, synchronized motions. COVID-19 patients also needed oxygen therapies, breathing treatments, drainage procedures.
Valerice showed up in February thinking she’d work three 12-hour shifts a week. That quickly became four or five shifts a week.
She’d get home every night, change shoes in the garage, slather on hand sanitizer and take a hot shower.
Her husband, Jermaine, would put on goggles and gloves and wipe down the inside of her Honda Civic.
“He was worried all the time,” Valerice said.
A mental-health toll
Gaztambide-Rodriguez was 37 when 2020 began. When it ended, he felt like 57.
“It’s been like dog years,” he said. “The amount of suffering seen by health-care workers this year equals a lifetime.”
One day stands out.
“July 16th,” Gaztambide-Rodriguez said. “That day will never leave my mind.”
He showed up at 6 a.m. to find Health Central Hospital’s ICU had 14 patients on ventilators. Three COVID-19 patients died that day.
What bothered Gaztambide-Rodriguez most was how they died — alone. At best, a family member might have spoken to them via iPad.
“I feel like I wasn’t able to say goodbye,” a wife of 50 years cried.
“That shook me to the core,” Gaztambide-Rodriguez said.
Doctors couldn’t allow themselves to dwell on such moments. There was always another patient waiting, another problem to confront.
“You put dirt over it,” Gaztambide-Rodriguez said. “But there’s only so much you can bury before you feel alone at the mountaintop.”
He was raised in Puerto Rico, did his residency in New York and settled in Orlando. Gaztambide-Rodriguez thought his career was just beginning, but now he wonders if he’ll be practicing medicine when he’s 45.
He’s worried a lot of health-care workers might feel the same way. They had to be tough to the core in 2020, but there’s only so much a person can take.
Into the breach once again
When AdventHealth Orlando began setting up its Covid ICU, it lined up doctors, nurses, technicians and equipment. But planners still needed somebody to keep the unit spic-and-span.
“They knew I’d be the perfect one,” Dorothy Dozier said.
The problem was, Dozier had retired in 2019. Her old bosses asked her to return, but she was pushing 65. Most people her age would not have gotten within 100 yards of a floor full of COVID-19 patients.
Dozier is not like most people.
“They are the reason I’m here,” she said of the patients.
In 2020, people were scared to touch shopping carts that hadn’t been sanitized. Dozier was ready to scrub down rooms where the COVID-19 virus lived.
She came out of retirement and worked 20 straight days. Even though most patients were unconscious, Dozier always offered encouraging words.
Visitors were rarely allowed in the ICU. Staff would sometimes hold a phone to the ear of a patient to hear familiar voices, even if the patient was unconscious.
When family members of an Indian patient called, they’d recite a chant. Dozier had no idea what it meant, but she began repeating it to the patient.
One day, he came out his haze and recognized her voice. He said the chant she’d repeated was the Lord’s Prayer.
“You prayed for me,” he said. “You’re my angel. You gave me hope.”
When the hospital got its first shipment of vaccines, management decided Dozier should be the first in line. She took the shot but didn’t feel worthy of the gesture of appreciation.
A lot of patients would have disagreed.
A survival story
Like almost everybody, health-care workers were scared of COVID-19. They just weren’t allowed to show it.
But sometimes they’d literally take off their masks and let their worries out. Mary Nelson’s job was to listen.
“I’m running into the fire while everybody else is hunkering down,” they’d tell her. “What does that mean for me?”
Nelson is the head nurse at AdventHealth’s ECMO unit. That was where the most critical COVID-19 patients went, essentially to live or die.
It’s easy to forget health-care workers faced the same fears and frustrations as everyone else during the height of the pandemic.
Nelson felt it when her two young children came home for spring break and didn’t go back to school. Their day care center closed, so Nelson had to line up home-schooling and babysitters.
Her husband is in the National Guard and was on a six-month deployment to Iraq. Nelson would send him photos of the empty shelves she found at Walmart. As with her nurses, she assured her husband everything would be all right.
There were days where it felt as if the ECMO team was fighting a losing battle. Then there were days like the one Jeandelize Velez will never forget.
She was pregnant and went to hospital with a fever. Test showed Velez had COVID-19, so doctors performed a cesarean section.
They took a picture of her newborn son for her to see, then wheeled her to the recovery room. Velez’s condition quickly deteriorated, and she ended up in ECMO.
Velez stayed there 50 days. The turning point came when nurses came in one morning and started fixing her hair.
Velez had no idea, but they were preparing her to see her baby for the first time. As she held him and cried tears of joy, Nelson’s team stood in the hallway and soaked it all in.
“It gave her what she needed to continue the fight,” Nelson said. “And what it did for the team was show them why they became nurses, and why they do what they do.”
Imagine 2020 without them
The phrase “health-care worker” covers thousands of people with thousands of jobs. But most have one thing in common.
When they see thank-you signs outside hospitals or grateful commercials calling them heroes, they feel miscast.
“I don’t feel praise is necessary,” Gomez said. “But I am grateful to the staff, the nurses, the people who kept the hospital going. I think they deserve a lot of praise.”
“What we do is not particularly heroic, really,” Elton said. “That is the job.”
They knew what they were signing on to when they chose their professions. Or at least they thought they knew.
2020 didn’t feel like going to work. It felt like going to war.
As with war, there was a lot of heartache and loss. But imagine where Central Floridians would have been if health-care workers hadn’t been fighting on the front lines.
Without them, we wouldn’t have stood a chance.
(This is the last in a series of stories about the six finalists for Central Floridian of the Year. The winner will be announced on Thursday at a free Zoom event starting at 5 p.m. To reserve a spot, go to OrlandoSentinel.com/centralfloridian.)
