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Longmont Journey: Hospital staff still willing to fight after battling fatigue due to COVID

“Here we are and we’re still fighting,” Tara Horne said. “We love what we do.” 

Tara Horne is the supervisor for pulmonary therapy, ECHO and EEG at Longmont United Hospital. This is a position that Horne is passionate about. Despite her love for caring for others, the pandemic has taken its toll on her and her teammates.

Horne grew up in the south, just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, with grandparents who smoked or had other lung- or heart-related illnesses. She had witnessed each of her loved ones struggle with their illness. While still figuring out what she wanted to do she saw a commercial inviting people to explore respiratory therapy. She knew then that this was her calling.

When the coronavirus hit the area, Horne was finishing her master’s degree in hospital administration at the University of Denver while maintaining a full-time job supervising the department and raising her now 15-year-old son. 

She accredits the success of her department to her team.

“I have an amazing team. I can’t believe all they have done through all of this,” Horne said. 

For Horne the respiratory team at LUH is a second family. Each person lends a hand where they can and supports each other. 

Not only do they support one another, but her team cares a great deal for the patients they serve, she said. Many are working more hours than what would normally be expected. 

In the early days of the pandemic, much like everyone else, Horne and her team felt unprepared in knowing exactly how to treat the illness nor what equipment would be needed. 

“We just didn’t know how. It just wasn’t something we had ever experienced before. My group has worked with some really sick patients … but this was a whole new ball game,” Horne said. 

Horne prepared the best she could by working with other Centura teams and learning what her team felt they needed. She even sacrificed her office to make sure her staff had all the equipment they could use at the ready, including PPE.

“In the beginning, we thought ‘oh we can do this,’ then the patients started getting sicker,” Horne said, which once again left her team at a loss for how to get ahead of the virus. 

“We used our training and our knowledge, working with our physicians and our nurses and we just did everything that we could, the best that we could,” she said. 

The unknown and the possibility of transferring the virus to their families became a big fear for Horne and her team. They all passed stories back and forth of disrobing in the doorways of their homes and dashing for the showers the moment they entered their homes, hoping they would not transfer the virus to their loved ones. 

Several months passed and Horne’s team felt a sense of relief having made it through the first wave of the virus. 

“We got through wave one and we thought ‘well we made it. That was not good. It was not fun but we made it.’ And we got a little bit of a break and then wave two hit,” Horne said. 

Gearing up for the second round, Horne and her team once again prepared the best they could as they faced patients who were a little more sick than before. 

“And now wave three has hit and they are really sick,” Horne said. “It’s been hard because as a health care provider, a lot of us have gone to get our vaccine and we do trust science because that is how we think. We have encouraged others to get vaccinated. We’ve been beat up a little bit because there are people who don’t trust the vaccine … It went from amazing support … but we are a little more beat up now because the vaccine is such a hot topic.”

According to recent findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, unvaccinated individuals are 29 times more likely to become hospitalized and five times more likely to become infected with COVID-19 than those who have obtained full vaccination status.

“We understand that there are people who are unable to get the vaccine and there are people who are scared to get the vaccine. We totally understand that. But it is getting harder and harder because people are getting sicker and sicker as the variants roll out. It’s hard on your spirit,” Horne said. 

As Horne told her story, she was unable to keep the tears from her eyes. The fatigue from the last year and a half clearly weighing on her, especially as she confessed to recently reading that another variant may be on its way with even worse symptoms. 

“When it started, we came out ready to fight and we weren’t tired,” Horne said adding a small break between the first and second waves allowed the staff a moment to collect their breath, although leaving them still trying to recover from the long hours and emotional fatigue of the first wave. 

“It seems that wave two has rolled right into wave three and we are just tired. It’s not that we are going to stop fighting but we are tired. Physically, mentally, emotionally, we are tired,” Horne said.

Across the nation, more and more hospitals are plagued with staffing shortages. LUH is no different. According to Horne, staff throughout the hospital are reconsidering working in health care or quit due to the level of fatigue they are experiencing. 

Horne tries really hard to grant vacation to her staff, however the shortages make it difficult to provide adequate patient care, she said. “It’s down to the point now that I feel horrible asking my staff to pick up more shifts,” she said. 

“We all know it will get better but in the moment, it feels icky for all of us because we want to take care of each other, we want to support each other, but sometimes we need a break. We need to be able to go home and be with our families and take a deep breath and go back to something normal, not that anything is normal,” Horne said.

Even when staff are able to get away from the hospital, Horne says her staff does not fully rejuvenate. She said staff feel as though they can fight a bit longer, gaining a bit of strength back. She says that although staff are able to get away they worry for one another and patients who were very sick when they left. 

“Even though we are not here, because we are who we are as health care providers, we can’t just walk out of here and ‘oh well, the patients are just there.’ That’s not who we are. All of that hangs on with us. We worry about each other, our patients, the future, our kids and our families. There is a lot that weighs on us even if we aren’t here (at the hospital),” Horne said.   

Through the tears and fatigue, Horne continues to look for the positive. It is clear that the team she works with is her family as her face lights up when she talks about them. They experience some dark days as they care for patients, but try to find something to bring them a spark of joy. Most of the time those moments of joy include food, especially ice cream, Horne laughed.

“Here we are and we’re still fighting,” Horne said. “We love what we do.” 


 

Macie May

About the Author: Macie May

Macie May has built her career in community journalism serving local Colorado communities since 2017.
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