Arriving in the Keys as the coronavirus pandemic first hit, Ginny Cone, 33, went right to work caring for patients as a nurse at Mariners Hospital.
“I kept thinking to myself, I came here at the perfect time. For such a time as this, when hospitals were dealing with a pandemic and sick people, it might make people nervous … I came fresh from that. Nothing scared me,” Cone said.
Born and raised in the Tampa area, the teacher-turned-nurse recalls the first COVID patient she saw while working at an Atlanta hospital prior to her arrival in the Keys roughly a year ago. (Cone also worked previously in the intensive care unit at Lower Keys Medical Center in 2017).
“I was the second nurse to get the patient,” Cone said. “I remember shaking as I was gearing up. I had no idea what was about to happen and what the course of the illness was going to look like. I remember that fear back then compared to today, when it’s just, this is what we do.”
There were nerve-wracking moments for nurses like Cone, who tried to relay whatever information she could about a still-baffling disease to the patients’ loved ones. Fully dressed and sweating inside her personal protective equipment, she was among the very few who entered the rooms of COVID patients.
“You’re trying to take moments with them. They’re enclosed, sick and scared in the same four walls. You’re their only human interaction. They can only see my eyes behind the gear.”
While some might feel sorry for nurses at this time, Cone sees it differently. “This is what I went to school for. Did I think I would be in a pandemic? Ebola was a thing and thank God it didn’t turn out to be bad. But it’s what I was trained to do.”
