Union members answer the call for assistance

Grace Garrison, a registered nurse with the Visiting Nurse Service of New York since 1989, and before that a hospital emergency room nurse, thought she had seen it all. Then came Hurricane Katrina. Garrison went to Montgomery, Ala., to volunteer with the Red Cross so she could help care for evacuees.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before. Nothing compares to this,” Garrison, 56, said during a telephone interview as she was completing the first week of a two-week stint.

Garrison, a member of the Federation of Nurses/United Federation of Teachers, is one of hundreds of nurses and health professionals who have answered the call for medical assistance along the Gulf Coast. The needs of the evacuees are enormous, their stories disturbing and the work overwhelming and emotionally trying, but Garrison said patients are so appreciative. “I’ve never gotten so many hugs in my whole life,” she said. “They’re so very grateful.”

With a backpack of supplies provided by AFT Healthcare but none of the promised Red Cross training, Garrison ventured south and was assigned to a one-stop service facility in Montgomery for evacuees from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and elsewhere. There are nurses, doctors, mental health workers and a restaurant of sorts in the building. People sleep outside in long lines, waiting to get their chance for medical treatment.

Garrison saw an average of about 60 patients a day with a variety of problems, including missing glasses, dentures and medication; extremely high blood sugar and blood pressure; and stress-related ailments.

“It’s their individual stories that get to me,” she said. “I’m OK except when I go to sleep at night. It’s so hard. I just think about all these people and what they’ve been through.”

She recounted the story of a woman in her 60s who had been shuffled among five shelters in various cities. “When I saw her, her blood sugar was in the 500s and her blood pressure was 240 over 100-something,” says Garrison. The woman told her that in New Orleans, she had seen babies floating in the water and elderly people who had died with towels over their faces.

The work isn’t for everyone, acknowledges Anne Goldman, a special representative of the Federation of Nurses/UFT. Many health workers who went to the Gulf Coast to help could not stay long because the work is so traumatic. Some emergency medical technicians from New York traveled to New Orleans to assist with emergency rescues but were sent to the waterfront to recover bodies, says Goldman. “The whole situation is just so awful.”

Lasting impressions
Lisa Daniels, a surgical technician at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, Conn., was with one of the first teams of relief workers to make it to the Gulf just days after Hurricane Katrina.

“What struck me first was the widespread devastation, but it was the little things that left the most lasting impressions,” says Daniels, who traveled to Bay St. Louis, Miss., with the faith-based group Willing Heart, Helping Hands.

In the small coastal community, destruction was everywhere, says Daniels, president of Local 5051’s LPN/Tech unit at her hospital.

Daniels went to work in a makeshift clinic set up in the town’s train station, where her duties ranged from filling prescriptions and treating infections to managing cases of heat exhaustion and dehydration. She also was part of a mobile medical team.

“It was hard to watch people struggle to have something to hope for. Many people lost everything and there was literally nowhere for them to go. I came back and realized how blessed I was to have gone.”

The experience is all the more important to Daniels since she almost didn’t go. The hospital would not allow her co-workers to donate their paid time off, nor would it allow her to use her vacation time for the days she spent doing relief work.

“I believe the hospital’s first responsibility is to patients in the community, but if I could provide coverage for my shift, why stand in the way? There are workers out there with a huge heart who are being led to go down to the Gulf, but their hands are tied because the hospital won’t cut through their red tape to make it easier for people to go.”

Although Daniels did not receive a paycheck during her stay in Mississippi, she did get donations from family, friends and AFT locals to cover her traveling expenses.