Caregiver Contest Grand Prize Winner: Megan H.

Congratulations to Grand Prize Winner Megan H.  from Janesville, Wisconsin.

The question is how has COVID changed caregiving, but it should be how has COVID NOT changed caregiving. For those of us that have the triple gift of having school-aged children at home, parents in the “high risk” group, and working as nurses in a hospital, the thought of life in the beginning of January 2020 seems an eternity away. As a caregiver at home, lecturing your children to ensure they have a mask before they get into the car, ensuring they constantly hand sanitize outside the home, and ensuring you have a large stock of toilet paper and disinfecting wipes on hand would have been laughable in December 2019. The fact I have to mentally fight the impulse to throw in a pack of toilet paper while at the store and while thinking, “Those hoarders are not going to get me again!!!!” I protect my children by not engaging in socializing with people outside of our house and I protect my in-laws by not going over to their house and exposing them to my nurse germs and my children’s germs. They are sad they do not get to see my children very much but understand the situation and are thankful for my risk assessment for them. 

As a nurse, I wear the full attire with patients diagnosed with and suspected to have COVID. I would like to think healthcare and nursing homes fully understand now the risk elderly and high-risk patients have with every single interaction outside their living space. The reality of the spread of the virus is always in the nurse’s mind when we hand sanitize 10,000 times a shift, but wearing the double masks, gowns, and taking your scrubs off in the garage when you get home and bagging them is just a daily reminder of how terrible the consequences of this virus is. The world will be safer and better prepared down the road when an even more lethal virus is among us and I am thankful for the educational opportunity it has brought to the world and to healthcare. 

Changes that I include in keeping with my routine include ensuring my children’s hands are cleaned while in social settings and with other people. I will never take the action of dropping my children off at school for teachers to perform their gift for granted ever again!!! I am thankful that I never had the notion to go to school to become a teacher, because I am not a grade schoolteacher. My children will confirm this fact to you! In the future, when one of my children wants to try a new hobby or a new sport, I will make sure they do attempt it, because it only expands their world and personalities. I dream of the day of not having to lecture my children to have two masks readily available wherever they are. One thing I hope we all keep is the grateful appreciation for others and strangers. I hope we keep acknowledge kindness to others. It makes our society stronger. 

Winners were selected by a panel of independent judges: Margarita Bermudez, the Manager of Professional Training and Healthcare Services at Alzheimer’s Los Angeles; Leigh Ellen Key, Executive Director for Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, South Texas and Louisiana/Mississippi Chapters; and Kelly Sparks, a retired CWOCN from Dignity Health. Click here to learn more.