Samantha Nagel remembers being taught a wide spectrum of things during her time in nursing school.
But not how to begin a nursing career just as the world comes to grips with a pandemic.
“There wasn’t really any training at all about it in nursing school,” the Lake in the Hills native said. “It was kind of talked about as previous diseases, and nothing like that could ever happen again, and we’re better prepared now, and so on.”
Nagel started her job in Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital’s emergency department March 25, 2020, just days after almost every hospital in the country began banning most hospital visitors and requiring staff to wear all types of personal protective equipment usually reserved for operating theaters.
“It became this very sterile environment all the sudden,” she recalled. “And in the beginning, the ER was like a ghost town because nobody wanted to come in.”
Frankie Cirignani began her career as a nurse at Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital more than five years ago, months before the COVID-19 pandemic changed hospitals and health care forever.
Brian Hill/bhill@dailyherald.com
A few miles to the south, Frankie Cirignani was experiencing something similar at Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital’s critical care unit where she had started in August 2019.
“It was a very scary time because I was just figuring out how to treat basic critical conditions and now I have to figure out how to treat a disease that is completely unknown and was learning about along with everyone else,” the Hinsdale native remembered.
Never in her wildest dreams had Cirignani imagined being thrust into a scenario where she had to deal with a global pandemic.
“I took an infectious disease course and it was kind of like an intro to pandemics and epidemics, but it was all focused on the past and nothing about what we would do or prepare us,” she said.
Both women said their immediate concerns were for their families. Both were living with their parents at the time.
Samantha Nagel said working through the COVID-19 pandemic at Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital’s ER strengthened her resolve in her chosen career, which started just days after the pandemic began in 2020.
John Starks/jstarks@dailyherald.com
“Two weeks in and I moved in with my nurse trainer,” Nagel said. “I had literally met her two weeks prior and she said, ‘Why don’t you come live with me?’”
Nagel stayed there for six months.
“We became very close,” she said. “That’s one of the positives, I guess, of COVID, is the bond with coworkers.”
Cirignani said she constantly worried about possibly infecting her family, including her sister who was pregnant at the time.
She said it was the first surge of COVID-19 patients that was the scariest for her.
Frankie Cirignani thought she’d experience some wild things working as a nurse at Endeavor Health Elmhurst Hospital, but never thought she’d start her career in the midst of a global pandemic.
Brian Hill/bhill@dailyherald.com
“We didn’t really know how to treat the patients during the first wave,” she said. “By the second one, we had more of an idea what to do and how the patient was presenting. A lot of the fear wasn’t there the second time around because we had been through it before.”
By early May of 2020 hospitals statewide were reporting 5,000-plus patients with COVID-19, and at one point nearly 35% of them were in intensive care beds, according to Illinois Department of Public Health records.
Nagel had similar recollections about the first wave of the infected.
“They weren’t allowed to have visitors, so the people working at the hospital were really all they had,” she said. “It was very sad sometimes.”
There are memories both can’t erase either.
“The hardest part was having these patients here for long periods of time and they just wouldn’t get better despite our best efforts,” Cirignani said. “I can’t get images of family collapsing on the floor in grief out of my head. It took a toll on us too.”
In late 2020, the Delta variant of the virus brought the second patient surge of the pandemic with hospitals statewide reporting more than 6,000 patients at its peak. However, new treatments kept many from requiring stays in ICU beds.
A year later, the Omicron variant caused an even greater surge of patients topping more than 7,000 statewide for a time. But advanced treatments and vaccines meant barely 15% were in ICU beds then.
“I just remember how amazing everyone that worked in the ER was,” Nagel said. “They truly are heroes; actually superheroes.”
Despite the exhaustion, the uncertainty and all the other changes they weren’t exactly prepared for when they chose their line of work, both nurses said the pandemic likely strengthened their resolve and reaffirmed their belief in their occupations.
“I wanted to be there and I wanted to help,” Cirignani said. “In terms of taking care of people, the pandemic really inspired me to learn more and further my practice.”
Nagel believes everyone in health care struggled through the pandemic, but most chose to stay with their profession.
“I think everyone had those moments where it was so tough at times where everyone was like, ‘How can I get out of this,?’” She said. “But looking back at it, it kind of made me think of why I truly got into nursing and in the ER. And that was to be with people on the worst days of their lives, to hopefully help them get through it.”
Illinois recorded nearly 37,000 COVID-19 deaths since the onset of the pandemic, according to federal records. Thousands more were hospitalized, with some still grappling with the lingering affects of the infection.
