work and luck.
For a week, the nurses assisted the regional nursing home’s staff with the unglamorous task of feeding the infirm and elderly and changing their beds.
The elderly were being driven in from other nursing homes in the area, since many of the facilities were in worse shape than Pearl River, whose own faucet water couldn’t be consumed and was relaying on its own power generator and stored food to stay afloat.
For Ecker, its was important, crucial work, but not necessarily what she might have envisioned for herself when she arrived on the West Coast 20 years ago from Cincinnati. Ohio. Educated in Nashville, Tenn., the single health professional, who has both a master’s degree in the fine arts as well as pediatrics, came to the Los Angeles area to pursue a life in theater.
“To get my master’s of fine arts, I left Nashville and headed out here, and in order to finance that adventure, began working as a nurse,” Ecker said. “I’ve never left nursing.”
While she continues to enjoy her artistic pursuits, Ecker has come to take on the large task of aiding the ill. At Saint John’s, she is responsible for coordinating local nursing efforts and ensuring that her staff operates at the highest standards.
In the wake of Katrina, Ecker and other administrators felt it was essential the hospital take action.
“I realized something needed to be done,” she said. “At first, I just wasn’t sure what we could do.”
Within five days of Katrina, she was able to contact a group of Mississippi health professionals over the Internet, who arranged to streamline the bureaucratic process of certification and agreed to honor Ecker and her colleagues’ California credentials. Ecker and others proposed their plan of action to Saint John’s. The Sisters of Leavenworth, a health care system comprised of eight hospitals, to which Saint John’s belongs, would send nurses on a rotating basis for eight weeks from their facilities nationwide, until the immediate medical needs of the victims of Katrina were being met.
After contacting Pearl River, Ecker and her colleagues were on a plane, bound for Poplarville, two weeks in the wake of Katrina.
“This is so huge and so bigger than me,” Ecker said. “There are about a million people who get credit for what they are doing.”
How did you get the ball rolling for your own relief efforts?
I’d say within two days of understanding the storm’s impact, many were scrambling to figure out how we could help. We received a call from our headquarters in Kansas, who told us they wanted to respond as a system. We had one of our doctors appointed to organize the effort and he did so quickly, coming up with four avenues as to how we might respond. First, we looked at bringing evacuated families to us. Second, one of the sister hospitals has a medic airplane, so we tried to figure out how it could be used to evacuate people or deliver health care goods. Third, we also thought of money, and have set up a system where employees can contribute and we will match funds. So far, we have raised $347,000. The fourth component was human resources, and that was my assignment.
So I asked the question, ‘Would there be a way to use our health care skills to help out?’ That Friday following the storm we began poking around on the Internet. The California board of nursing Web site had a new flashing icon that said ‘Katrina relief.’
That Sunday night I received a call from Delia Owens, director of Mississippi’s board of nursing. She wanted to see what we could do, but she warned me, ‘conditions are primitive, this is not easy work.’
Owens is one of the heroes in all of this. The chaos on the ground is notorious now, and the ability to coordinate incredible offers to help, with incredible needs, has been extremely difficult. But Owens made that happen early on. When she heard what we had to offer, she was so grateful and astonished at the depth of that offer.
She made the executive decision to lift licensing requirements or fees. She said, ‘you bring your California license and we’ll honor that.’
There’s a small town called Poplarville, Miss., about 40 miles north of the coast. Poplarville was extensively damaged in the storm, but their nursing home and hospital hadn’t been as affected. They had power up and running, and water, although you couldn’t drink it.
It was the only regionally standing nursing home. All the other nursing homes had nowhere to send their patients, or if they were, they were sending them very far away, to northern states like Ohio, Tennessee — very far from home — so they were trying to get the capacity to bring them to this facility in Poplarville.
What was the situation like when you arrived?
Pearl River typically handles 60 residents and there were more than 100 when we arrived. They anticipate more and they simply don’t have the nursing staff to cover that. They’re trying to balance the patient needs and what the nursing staff can handle.
They think, in the long run, they can recruit the nurses who may have originally been at the other nursing homes, but the other factor is that everyone around there is completely discombobulated — they have no power, they have no schools, the roads are broken down, and the phones are broken down. There’s no Internet access, there’s no TV. It’s a very rural part of the country, so TV is all by cable, and cable’s not back up yet.
So, in addition to not having enough staff, the staff they do have is tremendously beleaguered. For the four days after the storm, when there was no power and they were using a generator, many nursing staff moved their entire families to the hospital, so there were kids, older and younger people all in this trying circumstance, for shelter.
They were in the clean-up phase by the time we were there.
It was such a green and beautiful place to us, our first time there, but to the people who lived there, I can’t imagine what it looked like to them. The infrastructure was bad. Downed power lines, huge transmitters that were down. Cell phone towers, down. Whole swaths of trees, broken, like pencils. Huge oak trees that had been on the corner of a street and had probably been there since the city was founded, the roots sticking up in the air. They were having to cut these trees up and move them off the sides of the roads. FEMA would pay for clean-up within a specified period of time, and that helped a sense of urgency to get the trash cleaned up.
Housing crushed, animals from farms were killed.
What else was happening in the community? How were other relief groups responding?
The bigger occupier and attention for the Red Cross were all of the dislocated people, because, really, the entire coast was wiped out. Poplarville had set up a shelter in its high school, and there were families who has walked there all the way from New Orleans.
So the Red Cross was really busy setting up shelter all over in areas that were devastated to the east and west of us. They were dealing with really basic issues, like meals and medical treatment.
We actually went around and tried to assess what else was going on in the community. We couldn’t decide for ourselves, ‘Are we doing the right thing? Is this the best way to use our own resources?’ It always felt like a question we needed to ask ourselves, because we were the eyes of the entire Sister of Charities of Leavenworth, so we wanted to be sure we were doing the right thing and being good stewards of what we had to offer.
So, as we looked around, we stumbled at a state park outside of Poplarville, near a lake, where you used to be able to barbecue, camp out, or go fishing. A group of people were at the park, washing up, and we introduced ourselves as nurses, and people are just so glad to hear that, and just so nice in the region anyway.
So they welcomed us in, and we learned that evening, what was about to happen, FEMA was going to move in 20 to 30 trailers and position them around the lake, so families could be brought to the trailers, whose homes had been destroyed along the coast.
There’s going to be food and health needs for parents and children, counseling, all sorts of social needs to get them back to work again and find a permanent home. As bucolic as that lake is, it’s not home, but it will be for an indefinite time for those families.
By the end of it, however, we really felt strongly by the time we left it was a brilliant use of our resources, because there were other things other people were able to do that we wouldn’t have done as well, and the impact on the community would have been great if we hadn’t have stuck with it.
It was very unglamorous work. We’re coming from an acute care facility where we’re used to very sick patients, where we have those skills in spades. This was a settled group of chronically ill people in the last chapter of their lives, people very well known by the staff there.
They were the teacher nurses had known when they were in the first grade, and now she’s 99 years old and a resident there. This was a very intimate small community.
Our ability to support them was exhausting, but it felt tremendous. It was a clearly identified need, and we had an instant, strong relationship with the other nurses.
What did you do at the nursing home? There are basically two roles at the hospital, a nurse and nurse’s aide role, and we filled both. Whatever they needed most, we did it. We worked any shift they needed us to. It meant passing medications, personal hygiene care, bathing and turning beds. There was a fair amount of people who could take care of themselves with little assistance, and then there was another group that was disabled, or had had strokes, and were unable to do anything for themselves at all. We turned them and changed them every two hours and cleaned their sheets.
We stayed with them in the hospital. Ambulances and vans were bringing them in, and there was a team dedicated solely to logistics, but we stayed out of it.
We realized we were giving staff a break, and allowing them some time to have their loved ones near them.
Gas wasn’t available for the first few days, because the power was out and it couldn’t be pumped.
The need was unbelievable, but so was the response. I met a couple, two doctors from Minnesota, who after having heard about the hurricane, loaded up their SUV with medical supplies, and drove all the way down to Mississippi. They stopped on the side of the road, put out a sign, and offered medical supplies to anyone who needed them.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 26, 2005. Read the original PDF.