Nurses Stand Up to Hurricane Sandy

Hurricane Sandy has swept devastation over the entire eastern coast of the United States, uprooting trees, crushing houses, and flooding everywhere. During this natural disaster, most people were hunkering down in their homes, trying to stay warm and hoping for power. But the nurses of the area were hard at work, dealing directly with the fallout of the hurricane, and desperately trying to keep their patient's stabilized.

Perhaps the most famous story is of Margot Codon, a nurse at the NYU Langone Medical Center in the neonatal intensive care unit. On Monday night, the extreme flooding caused not only the power to go out, but the hospital's generator to fail. All the respirators and monitors keeping patients alive were now just heavy silent lumps of equipment. The staff was forced to evacuate patients, among these, a newborn who was only 8 hours old and still breathing on a respirator. It took a team of six people to safely move the infant and all the necessary equipment -- now being manually operated -- down nine flights of stairs in the darkness. Codon held the child and manually pumped air into the baby's lungs the entire way. Codon has been a nurse for 36 years and claims she has never experienced anything quite like this.

In Staten Island, nurses of the Visiting Nurse Service continued their care even as the hurricane whipped on around them. They tried to see most of their more stable patients on Sunday and prep them on disaster care scenarios, so that their time could be spent with essential patients on Monday and Tuesday. As phones were not working, these nurses actually drove in the storm to their patient's houses to make sure they were all right. One nurse almost walked into a live wire, and others left their own ruined homes on hold while they tended to their patients.

Many nursing homes had to be evacuated during or after the storm and there are still patients trying to find a place to go. There is definitely a need for another look at the backup nursing homes and hospital systems our country has in place. Luckily, the nurses are working hard to pick up the slack -- taking care of twice as many patients in spaces that are incredibly overcrowded, making house calls for patients who are not in critical condition and have a place to go, training family members on basic care for short term assistance.

Now, as the country is starting to get the clean up for Sandy under control, the coast is being threatened again, this time by a northeaster storm. This storm is expected to bring the same issues that Hurricane Sandy did, albeit in smaller doses. In the Rockaways of Queens, over 600 nursing home and adult care center residents are being evacuated before the storm hits. These facilities were already running on generator power and the evacuation is an effort to be preemptive.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the amazing things nurses have done in the face of disaster. There are many more tales that have not been told or may never be told, as they are considered just a part of the job. But that's what a nurse does -- they flourish in emergency and remain calm for their patients. It does bring up the question, how do you react in emergency situations?