LA GRANDE — Danita Thamert, like many other health care professionals, believed the arrival of COVID-19 vaccines earlier this year would put the darkest days of the pandemic behind her.

Thamert, a registered nurse at Grande Ronde Hospital, said that when cases were down this summer and a sense of normalcy was in the air, tired hospital staff who had been on the front lines of the pandemic for more than a year were hopeful the worst was over. Now, with the delta variant cutting a wide swath through the unvaccinated population in Union County, a weary hospital staff struggles to keep going.

“So many of the nurses are disheartened and discouraged. We were all excited. It was like, OK, we can unmask, we can go on about our business and have some semblance of normal,” said Thamert, who has worked at Grande Ronde for nearly 36 years.

As the virus continues to gain ground, it is taking a toll on front line medical workers, including Thamert.

“The stress is amazing,” she said. “We try to encourage the nurses to go get a massage, just go relax and do something on your days off.”

Grande Ronde Hospital is a 25-bed critical access hospital with 12 outpatient clinics. Having the critical access hospital designation means, among other things, that the La Grande facility’s average length of stay is 96 hours or less for acute care patients. During normal times, Thamert said, that was easy for the hospital staff to accomplish.

These aren’t normal times.

“I had a physician call 39 hospitals before we got a patient out where he needed to be, with the services that we didn’t offer that that patient needed,” Thamert said. “And in the meantime, we’re trying to do the best we can for these patients.”

There are only so many medical personnel to go around at Grande Ronde Hospital, Thamert said, and that too adds a level of complexity to the COVID-19 impact.

“I’ve got a full ICU, everybody knows it. So, OK, I can come in for a little while. There goes your release day, the day that you can rejuvenate and recharge. It makes our job more stressful,” she said.

Dealing with uncertainty, Thamert said, clouds the day-to-day work of hospital staff.

“As we continue on this journey, it’s like, when is it going to end? And nobody can answer that,” she said.

‘We’re fighting a war’

Especially discouraging, Thamert said, is that at one point it appeared — with the advent of the vaccines — that the fight against COVID-19 was nearing its end. Then the delta variant of the virus hit.

“Everything was looking rosy. We were all excited,” she said. “Now, it’s a war. We’re fighting a war. We’re soldiers and we will soldier on. But there’s casualties, and those casualties hurt.”

The pandemic also affects how the hospital cares for patients who do not have COVID-19, Thamert said, citing difficulty getting people transferred to other medical facilities or nursing homes.

“Working in the ER, we have patients that are coming in for things not COVID-related and we can’t get them transferred,” she said. “And in the meantime, we’re trying to do the best we can for these patients, and we’ve always been here for our community.”

Thamert said as hospital staff struggles with the day-to-day realities of COVID, individual cases resonate with the hospital staff.

“We had a gentleman. I didn’t know him. But we’d worked with him for a long time. We thought he was getting better,” she said. “He was at that ‘gonna get better’ stage and then I went home on my days off and I read the paper. I think that was the last paper I’ve read for a long time because his name was in there and it’s hard.”

That case personifies the daily, weekly and monthly fight medical personnel wage. Some COVID-19 cases often follow a specific track, Thamert said.

“They have this kind of phenomenon where they’re really, really sick and then they go up the hill,” she said. “They’re getting better, they’re getting better and you are really hopeful and, OK, this one is going to make it. We’re going to get the patient off a ventilator, and then they die.”

By then, Thamert said, nurses — and other hospital staff — are “vested” with that patient.

“Every time we lose somebody, it takes a little piece out of our heart,” she said. “It’s really, really hard.”

The hospital, Thamert said, still is doing all the things it must to support Union County, but medical personnel are tired.

“We’re delivering babies. We’re getting people their surgeries,” she said. “But yeah, it’s tough. It’s a war. A war of emotion, a war of education and teamwork, and we are soldiers in this.”

The mental toll

The pandemic also is influencing health care workers in other ways, Thamert said.

“There’s a lot of us that don’t sleep really good. That’s the big thing. It’s like you don’t want to go to sleep because you don’t want to relive this,” she said.

Nurses typically are Type-A personalities, Thamert said, who want to feel a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day, not go home feeling defeated.

“So, when you don’t get to feel that way, then you go over it in your mind. ‘What could I have done?’” she said. “Driving on the way home, sitting on the couch, pretending to watch ‘Jeopardy!’ — you’re sitting there going, ‘Gosh, could I have just done anything different today? Could I have saved that person?’”

Often, Thamert added, nurses must come to terms with the stark reality of COVID-19 and death.

“You don’t have time to mourn these people when you lose them, when you are trying to save somebody that’s coding,” she said. “You’re doing CPR, you’re giving drugs, you’re doing airways and you worked and worked for half an hour to an hour on this person and they die anyway.”

Thamert said bad memories can intrude at any time.

“Personally, after doing this for 36 years or so, there are parts of me, I think, that can be repaired, but some things I’ve seen and dealt with, you don’t ever forget that,” she said. “In a moment of stress or whatever, that’s what comes up in dreams.”

A new normal

The pandemic has also changed the way nurses and medical personal blow off steam. In the past, Thamert said, nurses often socialized together after a particularly bad day.

“Because, it’s like, by the time you get done, you just want to go home to your safe place and be quiet, just quiet, hug your kids, go make sure your husband is OK, in my case,” she said.

There remains a deep core of camaraderie among nurses and medical staff at Grande Ronde Hospital, but things are not normal, Thamert said.

“I hope we can get back to the old norm. But, again, I keep going back to the war reference and, it’s like, wars can go on for a long, long time. Now we have COVID, but it’s hanging on longer than any of those others and that’s kind of scary,” she said.

Thamert said hospital staff have developed unique ways to deal with the constant chaos caused by the virus.

“It’s like you come in to ER or something, you hear nurses laughing and talking and maybe making a bad joke or something, and it’s our way of dealing with the fact that we’re trying to keep this guy from dying, and this one just got through yelling at us, kicked us, spit at us, cursed us, because we’re not gonna give them something that they want, or we have the little guy that punches you in the jaw because he thinks you’re trying to kill him,” she said.

Caught in the crossfire

Nurses and other medical personnel haven’t escaped the controversy raging about masks and vaccinate mandates either, Thamert said.

“They cuss at you for wearing your mask at Safeway or the Walmart parking lot. I’ve been called things, been told I was not a real person for wearing a mask,” she said.

Despite the ongoing — and growing challenges of COVID-19 — Thamert said her nurses remain dedicated.

“You go home after this shift and you try to sleep. You get up the next morning, put your uniform on, have a drink of coffee, go out the door, come in this door and you greet the day,” she said.

Yet, Thamert said she is weary of the toll of the virus.

“I am tired of seeing young people die,” she said. “I am tired of seeing 50-year-olds die. That’s how we all feel when we come here to work, we don’t want any of these people to die. We’re gonna do everything we can to save them. And sometimes when we feel that way, it takes a toll.”

Two new forecasts predict a decrease in both COVID-19 cases and hospitalization in the next few weeks.

The state released its latest forecast Friday, which predicts new daily cases could plummet to between 830 and 1,060 in the last week of September and the first of October. (On Friday, Oregon reported 2,099 new known cases; it does not report data on weekends.) But that could be largely dependent on the impact of the return of more than 600,000 K-12 school children to the classroom and large, late summer events that could boost transmission, the forecast notes.

An Oregon Health & Science University forecast released Thursday doesn’t predict numbers of new daily cases but estimates that about 800 Oregonians will be hospitalized with COVID-19 in early October. (On Friday, that number was 1,002.) That’s still a few hundred higher than the state’s second-biggest pandemic surge in December.

The OHSU forecast also predicts that hospitals in the state will still be under intense strain for weeks to come.

— The Oregonian