NDA Alum Speaks Out on Covid, Message Used in National Broadcasts
November 11, 2020
A few weeks ago the NDA community saw one of its own, Jessica (DeGroot) Landry, on several national telecasts.
The ICU nurse commenting on the Covid crisis is the sister of Gina Fredrick, director of technology, and a 2001 NDA graduate now working as an RN at Bellin Hospital.
“I was asked to participate in a ‘nurse video diary,’ and I was under the impression that it would be a video for the Bellin organization. I did the video at the end of a long, hard stretch at work. I realized who was really asking for the videos when it was passed along. It was MSNBC and was used across a few national platforms for about a week,” explained Landry.
The NDA alum earned her Associates Degree in Nursing at NWTC and her Bachelor’s Degree in Nursing from UWGB. She has worked at Bellin Hospital for 16 years and is currently working in the ICU and the Covid ICU.
The link below is for one of the MSNBC national videos that included Landry’s comments. She is the third speaker around !:56 in this video.
Along with the MSNBC video, her picture and poetry comments have been shared almost 800 times on Facebook. With her permission the Tritonian proudly prints it here.
a world of emotions… hesitations… moods… expectations…
second guesses, double looks, triple checks… fear, confidence, doubt, experience…
our purpose shifts…
a new war… a pandemic. raise your hand, let’s go. suit up, wash your hands, put tubes in, pull tubes out… “it’s gonna be ok”… “you can do this”… two more gone today. next in line… which finish will they cross…
faces turning blue, life fading from their eyes. breathe in, breathe out… slowly… deeply… “you look better today”… “stay positive”… anxiety ensues, panic attacks… “don’t let it get to you”… more medications… ahh much better. breathe in, breathe out…
we pivot. coworkers become comrades… we carry a hefty label. we overlap your care, looping again and again… advocating, assessing, communicating, monitoring… watching trends, catching declines. don’t let those drips go dry…
steps become escalators…
high flow, CPAP, ventilator… and reverse…hopefully. “can you hear me”… “squeeze my hand”… wake up. go to sleep. we’ll try tomorrow again…
stories fill our heads, but can’t cross our lips… our souls get bruised from the ones we can’t fix… breathe in, breathe out… we echo to ourselves… breathe in, breathe out…
we got you, we got this.
breathe in. breathe out.
Gina Fredrick • Nov 13, 2020 at 6:49 am
Keep up the great work, sister!! Love you!