School nurses answer the call, volunteering on the front lines as coronavirus cases surge – NJ.com

Marie Noonan is on the hunt.

She is a disease detective, conducting phone interviews with coronavirus patients to trace where they have traveled and who they have seen, starting three days before they felt sick.

The objective? Document the chains of infection and figure out where COVID-19 will strike next.

“Find out who’s been exposed and did not know about it,” Noonan said. The data informs the state’s communicable disease registry, allowing public health officials to track the pandemic.

Noonan, normally a nurse at Elizabeth’s Nicholas Murray Butler School, is volunteering in the fight against the coronavirus. She is one of a legion of medical professionals who answered the call as New Jersey mobilizes to meet America’s greatest public health emergency in at least a century.

As the COVID-19 pandemic threatens to overwhelm the state’s hospital system, Gov. Phil Murphy has repeatedly asked for volunteers, saying they are critical to stemming an outbreak that has killed at least 917 in New Jersey. School nurses are among those who have responded, helping to staff testing centers, interview patients to document the contagion’s spread, work as EMTs and even offer care in a juvenile detention center.

In Union County alone, dozens of school nurses have stepped forward, according to Barbara Maher, president of the Union County Nurses Association and a former emergency room nurse.

They have full-time jobs to juggle, even with schools closed and the state under a shelter-in-place order. They provide scared families with up-to-date information about the disease raging around them. They call parents of children with medical conditions and listen to them vent.

And they have health concerns for their own family members, whether a 90-year-old mother, or two children with autism. Yet they heeded the call to serve.

NJ Advance Media interviewed five school nurses from Union County as they pivot to the front lines to combat coronavirus. Their accounts capture a slice of life in just one profession in just one of New Jersey’s 21 counties, as the state musters en masse to meet a challenge that Murphy has called “the fight of our lives.”

“We want people to know that we’re helping,” Maher said.

Noonan, who like many school nurses started out as an emergency room and surgical nurse, says the outbreak is like nothing she has seen before.

She can’t even guess how many people she has interviewed — patients, and when they are too sick to talk, their family members.

“I can’t believe what we are going through now,” Noonan said. “Never in our wildest dreams did we think we’d go through this.”

Diana Garces has worked for years at corrections facilities. This is the first time she fears going into one.

At her day job, Garces is a nurse at the Douglass School, a specialized Rutgers-run program for children with autism. But to earn extra money, she covers nursing shifts at the Essex County Juvenile Detention Center, where she spends every other Saturday and other evenings when needed.

“Nothing would scare me then,” Garces said. “Now, I’m actually afraid to go into jail, not because of the inmates or the residents.”

What scares her is the unknown. An invisible virus that could be anywhere.

Garces, 36, knows she has a lot to lose. She has four children at home, including a 7-month-old baby. Her two eldest — her sons, 14 and 12 — are both on the autism spectrum, the younger non-verbal. She cares for them, just like she helps Douglass parents care for their special-needs children, albeit remotely since the school shut down.

“She is a fantastic person,” said Catriona Francis, the director of the Douglass Developmental Disabilities Center, the organization that oversees the school.

School nurses are highly-trained professionals equipped to handle increasingly complex medical problems, whether it’s students with allergies, mental health issues or chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma and epilepsy.

Now, many are facing COVID-19 as well.

Garces said she is torn every time she goes into the juvenile detention center, knowing the dangers of contamination inherent in corrections, even with the precautions the Newark facility is taking. She thinks of saying no, but remembers her oath as a nurse to help others.

To ease her mind, she said, she reminds herself that no public place is safe from the coronavirus. She could contract it at the supermarket when she buys baby formula. Or at the pharmacy when she fills medications for her children.

“We don’t know either way,” Garces said. “Is it at work, or is it because you went to pick up something at the store?”

It is reassuring — and terrifying — she admits.

Milestone moments for Norma Huber’s family have been derailed by the contagion.

Her son’s wedding has been postponed until June, if coronavirus allows it to be held then. Her mother’s 90th birthday was last month, but the celebration had to be canceled even though she lives right next door.

“There’s so much uncertainty here,” Huber said.

She is a nurse at Hurden Looker Elementary School in Hillside. She has worked in the district since 1979, starting as a teacher. Huber is also a longtime EMT in her hometown of Mountainside, where she serves as president of the volunteer ambulance company.

“I respect her very, very much,” said Eric Pastore, the chief of Mountainside Rescue Squad. He remembers when he was a kid, Hurden was part of the ambulance crew that took his ailing grandfather to the hospital. “She knows everyone, and I mean, everyone.”

Many school nurses have a level of experience that is valuable in the crisis, but it also places them near — or already past — the age at which the disease is particularly dangerous.

Huber is 63 and has asthma, but she continues to respond to emergency calls on the nights she is on. Surprisingly, they’ve dropped with the outbreak, she said, probably because people are afraid to go to the hospital, fearing infection.

Recently, her squad received a COVID-19 call. Concerned for her health, her fellow medics recommended she remain at the station. She did, knowing they could handle the job.

“I said, ‘I’ll sit out, and I’ll help you clean when you get back,’” Huber recalled.

She’s trying to be safe, knowing this virus is different.

“Everybody is scared because unfortunately, with some dispatches, you can tell that they have something that is very catchy and you could get very sick,” Huber said. “But this is an invisible illness. Do you know what I mean?”

Rina Lieberman, a nurse at Elizabeth High School, likes to be cheerful. She likes to do things with a smile.

But wrapped in a surgical mask, gloves, goggles and a medical gown, how do you impart that to a worried driver who pulls up at Kean University to be tested for the coronavirus?

“With a mask on, you can’t tell if somebody is smiling,” Lieberman said.

That struck her Thursday when she volunteered at the Union testing center, working in a tent with two other medical professionals collecting samples. Drivers would pull up, and one of her colleagues would approach and take nose swabs. The samples would be placed five to a container, with names and dates of birth recorded.

It was only after they were done for the day that Lieberman saw the faces of the people she’d worked alongside for hours. It was only after they had taken off the gear that protected them from infection.

“Oh, now I know what you look like,” she remembered reacting.

Maher, a school nurse in Rahway, also spent a day last week volunteering at the Kean coronavirus testing site.

“I have a daughter who is a nurse who is yelling at me. She’s worried about mom, who is not 20,” Maher said. “She thinks I’m old. I’m 60.”

Like Maher, Lieberman felt safe at the site, and wanted to do her part to help. She said she has family members who already have the virus.

Lieberman’s team tried to cut through the forbidding atmosphere. They held up signs to the drivers.

“Feel Better,” they read.

Riley Yates may be reached at ryates@njadvancemedia.com. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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