For most of the world, 2020 was challenging at best. For Sally Baker Williams, 2020 was the worst year of her life. Her beloved husband, Doug, who suffered from chronic illness, had a heart attack in April and was taken to the Intensive Care Unit at Washington Regional Medical Center. With covid-19 precautions firmly in place, Williams had no choice but to wait for word of his condition in her car in the dark parking lot of the hospital. For two weeks, his condition deteriorated, and Williams' only choice was to monitor him from afar.
"I think my refrain throughout it all was, 'I don't have a playbook for doing this,'" she recalls. "I know how to do it when I can be 'the person.' I was always the person that was there for other family members in situations like that, and I was with each one of my parents in the final weeks of their lives. But I didn't know how to do it over the phone or Skype or Zoom or anything like that. And the hospital staff didn't either -- they were trying to figure it out as they went along. I was able to spend one day with him at Washington Regional while he was still what they would call cognitively intact -- a former co-worker really advocated hard for me to get to spend that day with him. And I cherish that day."
Williams' husband was ultimately transferred to another hospital, where his condition would improve slightly only to deteriorate the next day. Ultimately, Williams was asked to make end-of-life decisions -- still sitting in her car in the parking lot. Through her perseverance and social media skills -- she tagged the hospital online, asking why people could eat out in restaurants but not visit their loved ones in the hospital -- she was able to spend the last three days of Doug's life at his side.
"I went through what is not an uncommon scenario," she says. "Doug's and my journey wouldn't have been anything unusual during ordinary times. It would have been sad, and it would have been hard. But I was dealing with an ordinary situation in extraordinary times. Grieving, becoming a widow during covid-19 [meant] not being able to have a funeral for him and not having out-of-state family here. We had a small graveside service, and people held up iPads to FaceTime in out-of-state relatives. It was a very long, lonely year for me."
One place where Williams was able to stay in contact with the outside world was on Facebook. Williams was a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit -- NICU -- nurse for decades at Washington Regional and had formed a tight-knit bond with the nurses she had worked alongside. When it became evident that the covid-19 vaccinations would become available at the beginning of 2021, there was a flurry of activity in the group of which Williams was a part.
"A former co-worker, Lori Mahler, just took the bull by the horns and started contacting places that were giving the vaccine, saying, 'I've got a group of nurses that want to help,'" recalls Williams. "When Lori called me in January and said, 'We're doing this, do you want to help?' I said, 'Yes! I'm not vaccinated' -- because I wasn't in one of the first groups to be eligible for the vaccine --'but I'll double-mask, and I'll help outside. I don't care how cold it is.' Because it was something positive to do and something to help stop people from going through what I went through."
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Lori Mahler is a registered nurse who worked for 28 years in the NICU and then moved to the Veterans Administration Hospital, where she worked for another 10 years. She's been retired for three years, but, as a medical professional, she recognized immediately the seriousness of the situation when reports of covid-19 first started surfacing in January 2020.
"I felt like nothing was going to change until we had a vaccine -- I mean, it just wasn't," she says. "Unless 75% of the population got covid-19, which meant a significant amount of people would have died. And such a strain on the front-line nurses. They're actually the people that I'm really concerned about right now. Being a nurse a long time, you see death, but you don't see death the way some of these large hospitals have seen death unless you are in a war. I'm really concerned about the mental health of our front-line workers because of what they've seen in this last year."
Mahler may have retired, but her sense of duty and desire to help had not. She watched from the sidelines, anxious to figure out a way to pitch in.
"I never worked in adult ICU, so I didn't feel like I could jump in and help there," she says. "Plus, I'm 61 years old, and I've had cancer and some health issues. I'm placed at high risk. As a nurse of 40 years, my gut feeling was I wanted to help, but I didn't know what I could do. So I sat there really feeling helpless. I don't know if everybody felt that way, or if it was just my friends that were nurses that felt that way. I didn't know what to do, but I wanted to do something."
Mahler was amazed when the vaccines started rolling out in December 2020, but amazement turned to concern when she realized the structure to administer the vaccines quickly and efficiently was nebulous at best. A friend who worked at a local pharmacy said the pharmacy's phone was ringing off the hook, all day, every day, and the pharmacy did not have the manpower to handle the influx of calls.
"I think it was New Year's Day," she remembers. "I was in a FaceTime call with two of my friends who are full-time nurses, and we said, 'We've got to help.' I reached out to some of the hospitals and some of the pharmacies, and I got a hold of [Fayetteville city health officer] Dr. [Marti] Sharkey. I sent out a text to my group and said, 'Hey, does anybody want to help give vaccines?' I thought I'd probably get about 10, 15 people helping. But my phone blew up. There were days that I got five new nurses, some of them working full time, some of them working part time, some of them retired."
"Nurses Crushing Covid" was born, a product of Mahler's determination and a coterie of medical professionals just like her -- people who had dedicated their professional careers tending to the health and well-being of their community, who recognized a need and who stepped up, despite the potential risk to their own health. Nurses Crushing Covid volunteers stood out in the freezing rain, helping to administer vaccines to thousands of people at mass vaccination events. Working medical professionals showed up on their days off to assist. Mahler's team of volunteers also answered phones at pharmacies, made phone calls to remind people of their appointments and managed paperwork -- whatever needed to be done, they were willing to pitch in and do it. Mahler estimates that she has about 120-130 medical professionals and another 25 non-medical volunteers on her roster. Collectively, their contributions are enormous, though impossible to quantify. Mahler hasn't been keeping track of how many people she has personally vaccinated, but, she says, one nurse started keeping track shortly after she started and, as of mid-May, her tally was around 2,400 patients.
"But even if you've given just 10 vaccines, how many people's lives have you actually saved?" Mahler says. "A lot more than 10."
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With a background in vaccines and infectious diseases and a Master of Public Health, Dr. Marti Sharkey was a natural choice for the position of public health officer when Fayetteville revived its Board of Health in the summer of 2020 for the purpose of managing the pandemic in the safest way possible.
"At the beginning the pandemic, I started following the data very closely, realizing that if you didn't follow it day to day and record it, you couldn't see the rate of change," she explains. "I was kind of the first one to start posting daily numbers, providing updates and tracking what we were missing on the ground, the difference between what the talking heads were saying and what was happening in reality here in Fayetteville. So I was kind of already doing the role."
Sharkey shared Mahler's concern over the lack of planning for the vaccine rollout. So when Mahler contacted her with the offer of volunteers, she was pretty excited.
"I asked around, and, within 48 hours, I had heard back from a pharmacy who said, 'Dr. Sharkey, we need help,'" she remembers. "Once the pharmacies and hospitals knew there was a group of volunteers, they all said, 'We need help.' There was no way they had the manpower to do what was being asked of them. At that point, most doctors and nurses were working full time and couldn't leave their day job fighting covid to vaccinate."
Sharkey is blunt when talking about how important Mahler and her group have been to the vaccination effort in Northwest Arkansas.
"They have been critical," she says. "They're out vaccinating in Siloam Springs, in Lowell, in Bella Vista, in Farmington, all over the Northwest Arkansas area. They don't ever want a vaccine event not to occur because there's not enough manpower. We couldn't have done, for example, all the Northwest Arkansas Council events, the big J.B. Hunt drive-through -- so many critical events they have been present for, and we could not have done them without this group."
Towards the end of the school year, the Pfizer covid-19 vaccine was cleared for usage in adolescents from ages 12 to 15, and Nurses Crushing Covid showed up in droves to vaccinate that age group at area schools -- an effort Dr. Sharkey says was particularly valuable.
"I, as a pediatrician, am seeing more despondent adolescents and young adults the past two months that I have my whole career," she says. "You can't get in with a therapist in this age group at all. It's one thing for you and I to lose 15-16 months of our lives, just a random year, but you don't get back your senior year in high school. You don't get back your freshman year in college."
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Janie Agee's last nursing job prior to retiring two years ago was as a hospice nurse with Circle of Life.
"It was the total opposite of my previous job, which was working in critical care at Washington Regional," she says. "The thought of being out in my car, visiting patients by myself, was terrifying at first, but once you realize you're not running codes or doing any emergency procedures, I really enjoyed it. It was a very rewarding job. People were so happy to have someone come out and help them with everything that they needed. [Part of the job] was no one dies alone. If someone didn't have family, we wanted to make sure they weren't alone in their final time."
Agee's experience of the pandemic year was one of solitude.
"I was at home, by myself, every day for the whole year," she says. Agee's husband, Dr. Kim Agee, is a pulmonologist who worked through the pandemic (and is one of about a dozen doctors who volunteer their time for Nurses Crushing Covid). "I got more outside gardening projects done than I ever intended to do in the first place."
So when Agee started seeing the Facebook posts about the volunteer effort, she immediately signed on to help, thrilled that there was something she could do.
"I think I gave more shots in the last few months than in probably my entire nursing career," she says with a laugh. "Lori has done a really great job of organizing all this. She has just been phenomenal at reaching out to the pharmacies in different places who might need some help and scheduling -- I don't even know how she's managed all of this."
For Agee, actively helping with vaccination efforts helped instill a feeling of hope in a stressful and frightening time.
"When you read the headlines, it just sounds like it's nothing but, 'Here are all these people who are refusing to get the vaccines,'" she says. "But we were seeing all of the people who were excited to get it and who just burst into tears when they came in for the first shot because they were so relieved to get in. It was wonderful. They couldn't believe that it was finally happening, and they were so thankful for everyone who was helping out there."
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Agee isn't the only volunteer for whom the reaction of those being vaccinated made a big impression.
"My normal experience giving vaccines is, 'Dr. Sharkey, I'm scared of needles, I don't like shots,'" Sharkey says. "I say, 'Yes, nobody does. But we're going to do it, and here's why.' But now, they're so thankful and appreciative of us. Being there has been the most fulfilling part of my career."
"It was one of the reasons I was so motivated to do it, because after a year of feeling so helpless and hopeless, this was something that was helping and hopeful," says Williams. "Some people were apprehensive, but the vast majority were so excited. We'd have the large drive-through events, we would clap and cheer for people, and they would honk and wave at us. I mean, it was just really almost like a party atmosphere."
"Well, in the beginning, we were doing the elderly and high-risk elderly, and the vaccine was a little more scarce than it is now," remembers Mahler. "And the high-risk and the elderly had been basically ostracized, isolated from everyone else because they were at such high risk. They weren't seeing their grandchildren, they weren't seeing their children, they were going to the grocery store at 7 a.m. instead of at noon. So the people that were the most scared were the ones that were being vaccinated first. And they were so appreciative. You would put the second vaccine in somebody's arm, and these -- women, mostly -- would start crying. Lots of lots of the elderly cried and said, 'I get to see my grandbaby in two weeks,' 'I get to see my son in two weeks.' You just want to hug these people. It was truly heartwarming to give these people an opportunity to go see their families again."
Mahler and her mighty team of volunteers were honored at a ceremony in May at the Fayetteville Town Center, organized by the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas and sponsored by the Wells Fargo Foundation (many of the volunteers, including Mahler, are UA alumni). The mood was celebratory: Mayor Lioneld Jordan was in attendance, a band played, there was dancing; the biggest moment of the evening, however, was a surprise announcement of a $15,000 nursing scholarship, gifted by the Prewitt Mahler Tucker Private Wealth Management Group of Wells Fargo Advisors and the Wells Fargo Foundation, in honor of the efforts of Nurses Crushing Covid.
When recounting the evening's celebration, Mahler was clearly stunned by the attention.
"I guess I didn't realize what we were doing had such an impact," she says. "I just felt like I was doing what I should be doing, what needed to be done. The girls from the pharmacy stood up and said, 'We would not have been able to give 9,000 shots in a week without you guys.' A friend of mine came up to me and said, 'You're the glue,' and started to cry. I think that's when I really realized, 'Oh, we made a difference.' All of us. Ten of us could not have accomplished what 100 of us did."
