ROCK ISLAND, Ill. — For the past five years, Stephanie Keil has been a critical care nurse at UnityPoint Health Trinity's hospital in Rock Island. Working in the ICU, she's no stranger to stress.
But then the pandemic hit.
Keil's life went from three 12 hour shifts a week to 16 hour days; the hospitals ICU units were filled; PPE was stretched thin. But through it all, she says on the anniversary of when Covid-19 first took hold in the Quad Cities region, that she needed to be there, doing her job on the frontlines.
In honor of one year since the pandemic began, WQAD is highlighting the essential workers that have gotten us through the past several months. The heroes among us, who continued to bravely do their job, despite all of the challenges and dangers of dealing with Covid-19.
When we met Keil, she was four hours into her shift, after weeks of dropping case numbers in Rock Island County. But she took us back to those first few days, when the virus started to pop up in her hospital.
"You can't prepare for something like this, obviously it's brand new," she said. "Learning as we go is definitely the way we had to do it."
Infectious disease preparedness was something the staff had trained for, but Keil says when it was actually time to put their training to work, it was surprising how quickly they worked through their supplies.
"When we prepare, we have all the adequate things that we need and we have the supplies, but when you hit a pandemic, things are just depleted and you had to figure out a Plan B. We got very creative on things we had to do. It surprised me how strong we ended up becoming," said Keil.
At first, she said the case numbers trickled in relatively slowly, but by June, she said the hospital consistently taking in new patients. It was that moment, she says, that she realized things were going to get much worse before they got better.
"Once we started to lock down the hospital, I kind of knew we weren’t gonna be able to outrun this and we had to prepare. When we started to brace for impact, that’s when things started to get surreal," she remembers. "It really kind of hit home what was happening."
You can check out our previous story in this series, where a fourth grade teacher shares the lessons she's learned through the pandemic, here.