Flathead graduate details lingering trauma of COVID frontline duty

Mar. 7—Megan Brown-Moore is finally home.

After 13 months working as an ICU nurse on the front lines of America's battle against COVID-19 in Florida, New York, Virginia and North Dakota, the 2000 graduate of Flathead High School joined her husband and two children in Virginia in mid-February, but says she is still struggling to cope with her experiences.

"There are days when I just try to be a mom. I'm a nurse and I still have a job to do, but there are days when the weight of it all just hits me," she said. "It is something that all of the nurses and doctors involved will carry for the rest of our lives. I can't honestly tell you how I am doing because I haven't been able to take the time to sit down and really think about it."

Brown-Moore saw her first COVID-19 patients in Miami early last year, but made the decision to take a job at Nyack, New York's Montefiore Hospital as fears of spreading the virus were already forcing her to stay away from her husband, Justin, who serves in the United States Air Force, as well as her son, Jackson, and daughter, Lily.

The Daily Inter Lake interviewed Brown-Moore during her three-month stint in New York City in May 2020, during the height of that city's COVID-19 surge. Within the first 20 minutes on the job she saw her first death from the virus. Brown-Moore said she and fellow nurses did what they could as they watched the hospital's 391-bed facility overrun with intubated patients, many of whom would never go home. After hospital admissions finally began trending down in late May and June, Brown-Moore made the decision to return home to Florida in July, but she would find little rest there.

When the Air Force transferred her husband to Virginia in August, the family packed their things and made the move to Williamsburg. Brown-Moore soon found a job working with COVID patients at a VCU hospital 45 miles away in Richmond, but one of her worst fears came to pass as both her husband and son became sick with the virus that she could only assume she had brought home from work.

After a two-week quarantine, Brown-Moore once again made the tough decision to isolate herself from her family by once again taking a job in a COVID hotspot, this time in Fargo, North Dakota.

WHAT SHE found when she arrived at Fargo's Sanford Medical Center in September was a familiar sight — a hospital overrun with COVID patients.

"It was like New York in the aspect that they just got slammed and their hospitals were overrun," she said. "The hospital I was at basically went from a 13-bed ICU to 78 beds almost overnight."

While the situation may have been similar to her experience in New York, one thing was different. With time to prepare, Sanford Medical Center had been able to hire additional nurses to help deal with the influx of patients from Minnesota and eastern Montana, but Brown-Moore said that just gave her more time to get to know the patients she would eventually be unable to help.

"As a nurse, the situation in New York was horrific. There were simply not enough nurses. There, though, we would not see patients until they had no other choice but to come to us. We only really saw them at the end. We didn't get to talk to them or get to know them. We didn't have the time," she said. "With a better nurse-to-patient ratio in North Dakota, we were able to get to know our patients and their families much more often. When we lost people, it was much more personal. We were still losing so many patients, but it just hurt more."

Brown-Moore said she and her fellow nurses and doctors did what they could to help as the virus worked its way through the area's population, seemingly hitting the Native American population the hardest. She recalled one mother, in the ER with COVID, calling her to check on her 29-year-old son who was already in the ICU. The woman informed her that her son's uncle had already succumbed to the virus two weeks earlier and that two of his cousins were on the waiting list to be admitted to the ICU.

Another patient, with preexisting conditions, knew that if he went on a ventilator, he would likely never come off it. Instead of going on the ventilator, the man decided to console his roommates, put himself on comfort care and planned his own funeral.

Not all outcomes were tragedies. In late December, Brown-Moore celebrated as she was able to send home her first COVID patient from the ICU.

Tommy Nienhaus, the 38-year-old head soccer coach at the University of Jamestown had first been admitted to the ICU in mid-November and was one of the unit's sickest patients before taking a turn for the better. Forty-two days after being admitted, and two days after Christmas, Nienhaus went home. He is now recovered and has resumed his coaching duties.

EVEN WITH the success stories, Brown-Moore said the outbreak left the community struggling to deal with another side to COVID, a side many do not think about.

"What we were dealing with at that point were the long-term effects of COVID. I think that is something that doesn't get talked about nearly enough. The ICU patients that make it, which are rare, don't really get better. They are not going home," she said. "They are alive, but they may never walk again. They may never eat or breathe on their own again. People seem to think that if you survived COVID, then everything goes back to normal. That is just not the case. These people were in beds for months. Nearly all are still on ventilators and on high doses of pain medication. It's not a good quality of life, to say the least, but that is what those patients have been left with."

Brown-Moore said when she left North Dakota, her hospital had just one COVID-positive patient in its ICU, but still had 19 survivors there.

"COVID can sweep through an area like a wildfire. It comes through, taking the lives of many, but there are so many more who are left behind to pick up the pieces," she said. "The news keeps up with everything as the waves of deaths move through, but nobody really looks at what is left in the aftermath. Sure, there are ICU patients who survived, but I wouldn't call it living. They are left with a quality of life that I wouldn't wish on anyone."

NOW BACK home with her family, Brown-Moore has taken another nursing job, this time in her original field of cardiovascular care. While she said it is good to be home, she also knows she will now have to deal with everything she experienced over the past 13 months.

"My husband is in the military, so I don't use the term PTSD lightly, but that is what all of the frontline workers in this country are facing as we move forward. We were practicing war-time medicine. We still are. This is not over yet and there are still nurses out there that are fighting it. I just had to take a step back for a minute," she said. "In my quiet time, there are patients that I will remember and think about until the day I die. That's just the nature of this job. Even without COVID, there is always death involved with nursing."

As for her future, Brown-Moore said there will be many tough decisions to make as she moves forward.

"I'll admit it. I am burned out of nursing. I'm tired. So many of us ICU nurses are right now. It's hard to pick up the pieces and just go back to being a nurse again. That is one thing I am going to have to face soon," she said. "I don't think I can do this forever and I don't think I can do it for very much longer. Where do I go from here? I'm not sure."

Reporter Jeremy Weber may be reached at 758-4446 or jweber@dailyinterlake.com

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Megan Brown-Moore