Our Frontline Worker of the Week is… Nurse Coretta Alves

Aug 23, 2020 News

“Fear can cause us to do two things; either we cower, or we fight… We should fear COVID-19 in the sense that this virus is out there, but we should fight back by adhering to precautions.”

By Romario Blair

Nurse Coretta Alves

Prepared to wage war against COVID-19.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to intensify in Guyana, being in the line of duty appears to be increasingly difficult for our health care workers on the frontlines. Despite the challenges they face, however, our health care workers continue to selflessly render their life saving services with some of them even going above and beyond the call of duty.
Coretta Alves, who works as a professional nurse at the Institutional Quarantine area at the Suddie Hospital, is one of the many professionals who have been doing a remarkable job caring for our COVID-19 patients. Nurse Alves has been in the profession for over eight years and she believes that the best part of being a nurse is being emotionally available for a patient; without any sort of prejudice.
But for her, being a nurse wasn’t exactly her dream career. Nursing and caring for people she doesn’t even know, however, is today something she has grown to love. It was therefore no surprise, that when the opportunity presented itself for her to work in the COVID-19 Quarantine area, she willingly signed up.
FALLING INTO PLACE
Nurse Alves grew up in Capoey, which is an Amerindian community famous for its natural lake on the Essequibo Coast. There she grew up with her mom and four siblings. She attended the Capoey Primary school, before attending the Abrams Zuil Secondary School. She graduated from secondary school with nine subjects and then pursued studies at The Business School.
During an interview with Kaieteur News, Nurse Alves said that following her graduation from secondary school, she was yet to focus her mind on a career

Sharing a moment with friends.

choice. In explaining how she stumbled on to nursing, she said, “After I finished school I went back home by my aunt…one day I was sitting by the landing and an NDC officer, who was in the community for a meeting, asked me why I wasn’t in school. I told him I’d finished school but wasn’t in a job… he then asked what I thought about nursing. Since my mom was a village councillor he helped me to fill out some applications.”
When asked if she knew what she was signing up for, a giggling Nurse Alves replied, “I had no idea what I was signing up for…I didn’t even know what the profession was about because I was in the business stream. I didn’t know whether I was signing up for professional or assistant nursing. But a couple months after, my name was in the papers and I was placed in professional nursing.”
Nurse Alves said that for once, everything appeared to be falling into place, even to the point that she started to love the idea of becoming a nurse. “So eventually I got into the Georgetown School of Nursing and there I did a diploma in professional nursing, wrote my exams in 2012 and became a registered nurse on the 11th May 2012,” she related. Ever since, she has been working at the Suddie Hospital. “From the 2nd August (2012) I have been working there; I worked in critical care for a year, then in the ICU.”

With her loving daughter Annalee.

For the past two years, Nurse Alves has been the head nurse in the hospital’s emergency Department. She admitted that moving to the hospital’s COVID-19 Quarantine area, was indeed a huge step, but her decision was fuelled by the need to help others. “I stayed in nursing because I love being a nurse. I love taking care of people and so when the opportunity came up for me to volunteer in the quarantine area I did so without hesitation.”
Working in an institutional quarantine facility, she said, entails monitoring the patients’ vital signs, making sure they take their medications, and most importantly ensuring that patients are comfortable. Nurse Alves admitted too that there is a completely different approach, when it comes to health care delivery in the quarantine area, which can be challenging from time to time.
She went on to explain, “being isolated is hard, not only for the patients but for you as a nurse as well. I would describe it as a very emotional phase. As a nurse you’re accustomed to being there physically with your patient and it helps a great deal in offering emotional support. But with COVID-19 that’s not the case because minimum physical contact is recommended when dealing with COVID-19 patients.”
Nurse Alves, in a sad and emotional tone, explained, “There was this recent experience I had where there was a little child in quarantine. The child she was crying, and she was taking off the saline saying she wanted to go home. Honestly as a nurse it’s hard not to become compassionate when something like that is happening…usually in a situation like that I would’ve picked up that child and try to comfort her in my arms. But witnessing that from a distance and being able to do little to help the situation was heart breaking, because it could’ve been my child in there.”
NECESSARY SACRIFICES
Nurse Alves has made a number of huge sacrifices as part of her dedicated effort to help battle COVID-19. She said that she was quite aware of the risks of working in the Quarantine Department, and as a result, had taken the decision to temporarily isolate herself from her daughter. Her daughter and only child, Annalee Alves, is just nine years old and is staying with her grandmother so that she can remain safe.
Nurse Alves said that temporarily giving up her daughter, who she has seen only twice in five months, has been one of her greatest sacrifices. “My nine-year-old daughter is with her grandmother because right now it’s risky that I am here and have to go home to her. So when school closed in March I sent her to her grandmother. The fact that I’ve seen her twice since then… it’s very hard because the way I was raised, I lived with my parents for 11 years, then I came to the coast I had to live with my aunt. I never wanted my daughter to live with anyone other than me. But it’s something I can’t help because my working hours are longer now and it’s risky because she’s only nine; I can’t take that risk of being around her. I talk to her as often as I can and I pray to God to keep her safe,” Nurse Alves shared. Because she is seldom able to visit her daughter, a smiling Nurse Alves said that she decided to get her a puppy.
EMOTIONAL STRENGTH
For most of us, being in a sad and emotional setting, can eventually lead to secondary post- traumatic stress. Nurse Alves said that her past experiences have helped her in coping with the horrors of COVID-19. She went on to share experiences that occurred before the pandemic. “As a nurse, who has been in the profession for over eight years,” Nurse Alves said that she has had “quite a number of experiences, which left me in shock for days.”
“As a nurse, at times you witness people die in front of you. This one time I had a patient who was an elderly woman. Now her husband had died, and we were worrying how is it we can tell her that her husband had died. But before we could tell her, her daughter got the news, her daughter rushed in the ward crying and there the daughter fell down and died of a heart attack. All I could’ve done was to embrace this elderly woman and that thing really bothered me for a while,” Nurse Alves noted. But it was experiences like those that helped her to become a resilient health care professional.
FEAR FACTOR
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc all across the globe and quite a number of persons in the medical field have agreed that the virus can be hard to trace and contain, since infected persons can at times exhibit no symptoms.
When asked if the public should fear the coronavirus, Nurse Alves responded by saying, “Fear can cause us to do two things; either we cower, or we fight… We should fear COVID-19 in the sense that this virus is out there, but we should fight back by adhering to precautions.”
“We need to be more educated about it. We need to know what it does to the body and when we try to give information, we need to put it to the level of the people. Sometimes when we are explaining these things, but we need to do it in a way they understand and stop using too many medical terms. Most Amerindian communities are being infected and the level of information that was fed to them I’m not sure if they understood what was happening,” Nurse Alves added.
Nurse Alves pointed out too that while COVID-19 is described as a dreaded disease, there are a few advantages that have been derived from it. She highlighted, for instance, the fact that the outbreak has served as a wakeup call for a number people. “Prior to COVID-19, nurses weren’t recognized that much in Guyana; people never use to take the Health Department serious but now it’s different. During COVID-19 people see the importance of health, something they had put aside for so long. Eating healthy and exercising to keep themselves strong and how important it is to have checkups, some people now are getting that… Some of us get to spend more time with our families and spend time with God. Some have realized that we’ve been too busy and so we slow down and say hey, we need to check what our priorities are,” Nurse Alves noted.
Most of us look forward to the day when COVID-19 will be a thing of the past. We look forward to the time when life can revert to the way it used to be. The question remains, however, how long will it take?
According to Nurse Alves, “the end of COVID-19 depends on the cooperation of the people. I believe that if we stand together and if we do this together, we can be better in a few months.”
She underscored too that “Most of our patients here are recovering but most of them show symptoms so persons need to take precautions. Not because you’re not feeling sick means you are not infected. Sometimes you can be infected and not know, and you pass on the virus to someone who has a weakened immune system…”
Moreover, Nurse Alves has concluded that “The only thing that can protect you is wearing your mask, the social distancing and the washing of hands as often as you can.”