GREENSBORO (July 30, 2021) – We’ve heard stories about firefighters who run toward the fire rather than away from it.
Well three UNC Greensboro nursing students did just that at the height of the coronavirus pandemic last year.
In the accompanying video, UNCG Associate Dean of Nursing Heidi Krowchuk tells the stories of three graduate students with extensive experience in intensive-care units who volunteered to go to New York and help in hospitals there in March 2020.
“They decided to go to New York and help out with some of those in the hospitals where they were really short of staff – and the stories they have are incredible,” Krowchuk says.
“You just have to say, ‘Oh my gosh – I can’t imagine having to deal with that.’”
Two students – Scott Dollar and Ali Cosgrove – went to Buffalo, where they worked 12-hour shifts in a hospital that treated only coronavirus patients.1
BEVIN STRICKLAND, a single mother with two teenage children who was pursuing a Doctor of Nursing Practice, wrote directly to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and went to work in the emergency department at Mount Sinai Queens Hospital at the very epicenter of the pandemic.
“I wanted to go there and help,” Strickland told her UNCG family in a cell-phone video on her way to New York. “And prayers for all the people that are going through this, and especially the very sick ones.”2
Krowchuk was awestruck.
“She would spend more than 12 hours a day dealing with incredibly ill patients, and helping them die,” Krowchuk says. “Just phenomenal.”
1 https://news.uncg.edu/students-fight-covid-19-new-york/.
2 Ibid.
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