The Care They Give
Across the region and in a wide range of practice areas, health care heroes have risen to the occasion during the pandemic.
In February, students in the University of Missouri-St. Louis College of Nursing received an email telling them that their next clinical would be at a vaccination clinic at BJC HealthCare’s Christian Hospital. (During the pandemic, clinicals have been some of the only times that UMSL nursing students gather in person; most lectures are given over Zoom and classwork is often completed online.) Like her peers, 25-year-old Janssen Blackmon anticipated that the day would include a seminar and an opportunity to shadow nurses from health care networks across the area as they vaccinated eligible St. Louisans. But soon after they arrived, a supervisor approached the group to announce: “You’re going to be administering the vaccines today.” There wasn’t much time to process their new role, but the aspiring nurses knew what to do. After leaders reviewed the procedure, the students began administering Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine. “I was anxious, excited, everything at once,” recalls Blackmon, who will graduate this month after finishing her senior synthesis clinical at Missouri Baptist Medical Center.
Blackmon remembers the first patient of the day, who rejoiced at being the first in the family to receive the vaccine. She explained the pertinent information, including the possibility of inflammation at the injection site, and helped the patient schedule an appointment to receive the second dose. Soon she got into a rhythm. After receiving his injection, her last patient of the day thanked her. “You are a hero,” he said. His gratitude reminded her of why she’d dreamed of pursuing nursing when she was a child: “I thought, Oh,my God. This is how I wanted to make people feel.”
The title of “hero” has been hard to accept for Mandi Tuhro, a nurse in the intensive care unit at MoBap. “This year has been me saying, ‘I can’t have someone or something need me any more than they already do,’” she says, “but then that person or something needs me more, and I just do it.”
In November 2019, a pregnant Tuhro earned a master of science degree in nursing. She planned to spend her maternity leave looking
