Name: Nurses: Tough, tender pros who love their jobs
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Nurses: Tough, tender pros who love their jobs

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SHAREMichelle Latona is no hero. She’s a nurse, in the emergency department at Mount Sinai Hospital.Latona certainly doesn’t consider herself heroic.“No, I don’t,” she said. “I wake up every morning and I come to work and do my job.”A job that demands she tend to the sick and the dying for 12 hours at a stretch. To juggle patients, rooms, medicines, doses, equipment, colleagues, hours, breaks, all the time keeping focused on the central task: making people well again.“We’ve been saving lives the entire time,” she said, admitting that since the COVID-19 pandemic hit Chicago in mid-March, things have changed.“This is a different time,” she said. “But I’ve continued to show up to work and do what I do.”Latona never knows what’s coming through the door.“This is a trauma center,” she said. “We still have gunshots, car accidents. Kids still fall off bunk beds. Now there are extra precautions. We have to go under the assumption that everyone is positive until they’ve proven negative. The COVID adds a little bit of extra stress.”That “little bit of extra stress” has to be heroic, the modesty of the truly courageous, since most folks feel extra stress going to the supermarket, never mind having to intubate COVID-19 patients in an ongoing worldwide crisis hitting nursing much harder than most professions.Nurses are the tip of the spear. The National Nurses Union reports at least 50 nurses have died in the United States from the coronavirus, and some 10,000 have been sickened by it. The only reason the death toll isn’t higher is because nurses tend to be younger, and fitter. Latona says her main hobby outside the hospital is working out.She is one of almost 4 million registered nurses in the United States. Since Tuesday is International Nurses Day, it’s worth mentioning that there are 20 million nurses in the world, according to the World Health Organization.If you haven’t heard of International Nurses Day, that isn’t because it’s new — the celebration began in 1965. It’s on May 12 because it’s the birthday of British nurse Florence Nightingale, who was in charge of nursing in military hospitals in Turkey during the Crimean War. Like nurses ever since, she had to overcome hostile doctors, who at first would not allow the new female nurses in the hospital wards. And like today, Nightingale battled obstinate authorities to get desperately-needed equipment, which she often dug into her pocket to pay for. Nightingale shrugged off attempts to honor her after the war, taking the collection grateful Londoners had taken up for her benefit and using it to found a nursing school in 1860, the first in the world.Asked what she likes most about nursing, Latona replied:“Our team here, we have such a strong team. We’re like family. We’re showing up. We’re picking up extra shifts. We’re filling in holes where we need to. We’re helping each other so much.”Latona grew up in Bensenville, her father a Mexican immigrant. Before she worked at Mount Sinai, she worked at a clinic for underserved patients. “I just really enjoyed working with that population,” she said. “Low-income, uninsured, immigrants with no paperwork. I could relate. Just because they’re here doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be cared for.”Her husband is a lawyer, and they have three young children: two boys, Theodore and Benjamin, 6 and 3, and a girl, Victoria, 22 months.“My oldest always says, ‘Do you have to go to work?’ I say, ‘Yes, I have to go help sick people.’ He’s said, ‘Mom, I want to go to work to help sick people.’ He understands. All the kids understand when I come home, nobody can touch me until I take a shower.”Latona feels safe, feels confident coming home to her husband and children.“I do,” she said. “We feel comfortable. We’re taking the proper precautions. My kids are all really healthy, we have no preexisting conditions. My husband said, ‘Do you want to quarantine in a hotel?’ and I said, ‘Who knows how long I’ll be gone?’ ”Victoria is named after her mother, “probably my best friend, probably the strongest person. I know.”“She was a huge caregiver for my kids,” said Latona. Then her mother was diagnosed with COVID-19.“She got sick back in March, right when this took off,” Latona said. “She was intubated, in the ICU for three weeks.”Being a nurse, Latona knew what being intubated meant: About 90% of people who go on ventilators don’t survive.“The worst part was, she was alone. I couldn’t go to the hospital with her,” Latona said. “She is in the ER by herself. She calls me and says, ‘They want to intubate me.’ I immediately started crying, because I knew what that meant. I hung up thinking, ‘Was that the last time I talked to my mother?’”Latona had to care for everyone but the one person she most wanted to care for.“It was definitely hard to come to work, seeing everything here; trying to focus, trying not to think of my mom,” said Latona. “I want to be present and care for my patient. Especially knowing what my mom is going through.”Her mother is off the ventilator and recovering; in an odd way, her getting sick made her daughter an even better nurse.“The fact my mom is by herself, it makes me more empathetic and understanding of the stress family members are feeling, the panic they are having,” Latona said. “Sometimes we’ll get phone calls from the family, and before you might feel, ‘We’re trying to do work!’ Now there is realization: They’re scared. I completely get it. The patient is scared. The family is scared they can’t be there, and they don’t know what’s going on.”Latona wasn’t one of those girls who grew up bandaging her dolls and taking their temperature. Nursing wasn’t on her radar.“It was actually a second career for me,” she said. She went to Illinois State, studied marketing, soon found herself wrangling the Shrek toys that went into McDonald’s Happy Meals.“I was thinking: ‘What did I accomplish today?’ I felt very unfulfilled, not happy with it. I was thinking: ‘I want to do something to help people.’ I always liked science, and I always liked people. I was having a conversation with my mom, and she said, ‘I wish I had gone to nursing school.’ That got me thinking that’s the route I want to go. I went to nursing school.”And what part of nursing is more fulfilling than marketing?“All of it,” she replied. “In the emergency room you learn something new every day. You never feel stagnant. You ask, ‘What can I do?’ and there is always something to improve on, something to learn. The fun part of medicine is you’re never done learning what you can do better.“We are such a family here. If you see somebody struggling, you go over to help them. ‘Give me something to do; what do you need?’ I never feel alone at my job.”And COVID-19? Another chance for nurses to step up and shine.“Even with everything going on personally, after all this started, I never called in [to take time off]. I felt I owed it to my work family to be here and help them.”Five years into the profession, Latona has found her home.“Something about nursing just called to me, and I’ve been very happy in that decision,” she said. “I don’t see myself doing anything else ever. You’re always learning something.”Like Marines, like firefighters, there’s an annealed-in-flame quality to nursing. They’ve gone through the worst, together, which makes them strong, as a group and as individuals.“It’s all pretty true,” she said. “We’re a tough group of people. We love our job. We see the worst of the worst. The ER is hard because we see somebody’s worst day, every day. We go from somebody passed away in that room, the worst day of that life, and we go in the next room, and that person is having the worst day of their life. That’s why our job is hard. It gets hard.”Hard, though the job is not without benefits. The praise can be a little embarrassing. But the food is appreciated.“We’re been very spoiled, lunch provided for us, really frequently,” she said. “We don’t think of ourselves as heroes. We’re just showing up doing our job. That said, we’re not going to say no to a nice lunch.”In This StreamNext Up InMost ReadThe LatestAs scores go, Henry Krieger wrote a fitting tribute to the artists whose work is referenced here. 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SHAREMichelle Latona is no hero. She’s a nurse, in the emergency department at Mount Sinai Hospital.Latona certainly doesn’t consider herself heroic.“No, I don’t,” she said. “I wake up every morning and I come to work and do my job.”A job that demands she tend to the sick and the dying for 12 hours at a stretch. To juggle patients, rooms, medicines, doses, equipment, colleagues, hours, breaks, all the time keeping focused on the central task: making people well again.“We’ve been saving lives the entire time,” she said, admitting that since the COVID-19 pandemic hit Chicago in mid-March,...

Nurses: Tough, tender pros who love their jobs

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