Onalaska Grad Takes Nursing Skills to Brooklyn to Fight COVID-19

For nurse Suzi Frase, who recently traveled from Kentucky to New York to work in an intensive care unit for COVID-19 patients, her after-work routine is pretty consistent — shower, cry, hug her cat, and do a Facebook live video to let her friends and family know she was OK. 

While originally intended to help her keep up with daily check-ins from her closest friends and wind down after intensely stressful and tragic shifts at her Brooklyn hospital, the live videos have gained a following of people from her home-town of Onalaska, friends in Seattle, California, Oregon and Kentucky and also a growing number of complete strangers hungry for information from a first-hand source. Before she knew it, her videos were getting thousands of views and she was getting friend requests from around the country. 

“It started with me doing an evening check-in. … It turned into people sharing them,” she said. “I’ve just been really impressed with how much people really want to know. I would talk about my experience, I would decompress. … People want more information.”

When Fraze talks about her experiences nursing COVID-19 patients in one of the hardest-hit states and cities in the country, she doesn’t hold back. 

“One shift, they lost 20 patients. In one shift,” she said. “I have no motivation to lie about this. What would be my motivation? Do you think I’m happy that we lose so many people they end up in a freezer truck? That’s like something from a horror movie, but that’s what’s happening here.”

She’s particularly frustrated about how the pandemic has become politicized. 

“The one thing I hope we take out of this is we’re all in this together, we have been such a divided nation,” she said. “I hope the one thing we get out of this is we are all in this together and we need each other.”

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Frase, 37, grew up and graduated high school in Onalaska before moving to Seattle for her undergraduate degree, now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she most recently specialized in nursing in the neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU. 

She was about to start her post-doctoral fellowship to complete her Ph.D in nursing, but decided to quit her job and find a temporary posting in a New York Hospital. 

“I put my grant on hold so I could come do this because it felt like this might be the most important thing I could ever do, to come and help where help is needed,” she said. “… Originally my plan was I would chase COVID around the country”

She brought her cat, Phaedra, who she knew would be essential for the trip. 

“I knew I would need her,” she said. “I’ve always had pets. I knew I would need emotional support.”

As a nurse who specializes in the youngest patients, she had a small learning curve to begin treating adults, but said the basics of nursing are the same, and that her colleagues in Brooklyn were grateful just to have her there. 

“I’m not above asking questions even if they sound stupid,” she said. “I’m smart, I knew I could pick up on it, I did a lot of studying beforehand.”

Even so, with a brand-new virus, they’re all in the same boat. 

“These COVID patients, they’re new to everybody. It’s a new experience for everyone,” she said. 

When she started about two and a half weeks ago, nurses were regularly assigned four critical patients each, which she said is just too high of a workload for intensive care. They had little choice. However, before she arrived, Frase said it was even worse. 

“At one point they were having eight, nine patients each, which is completely undoable,” she said. “It’s crazy.”

Frase noted that her hospital serves a predominately low-income African American neighborhood, and that there is a serious disparity in how badly the disease is impacting that community. For healthcare workers, it’s common knowledge that low-income equates to high rates of pre-existing conditions and bad health outcomes from acute illnesses.

“In my first six shifts, I lost four patients of my own,” she said. 

She clarified — that is absolutely not normal. 

“In the ICU you have a lot of intubated patients, you have critical patients, but a lot of them you can save,” she said. 

And she said, yes, a lot of people die from the flu each year, but not like COVID-19.

“One of the worst false equivalencies I’ve seen with this is that this is just like the flu,” she said. 

Among patients at her hospital, she said those who struggle the most to combat COVID-19 are patients with hypertension, diabetes and obesity, regardless of ages.

“I lost a patient last week, she was only a couple years older than me. She was a bigger girl so she had the obesity thing going against her, but otherwise she didn’t have any known pre-existing conditions, and she died,” Frase said. 

Another victim was a 31-year-old woman with no preexisting conditions. 

“It’s a horrible way to die. They can’t have visitors,” she said. “They take weeks to die. That’s another heartbreaking thing — they take weeks to die and they never see their loved ones again.” 

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Despite what she’s seen, Frase said we don’t need to panic. But we do need to be vigilant, and listen to what health professionals are telling us. 

“There’s no reason why what happened in New York won’t happen in other places,” she said. 

The problem, Frase said, is lack of access. In most cities, there are a limited number of intensive care beds. When you have more people in need of intensive care than you have beds, hospitals become overwhelmed and can’t deal with the situation effectively, like what happened in the early days of the outbreak in New York. 

Last week, she said she could see positive signs. 

“(Cases are) not going up at the same level and I took the freezer truck leaving as a very good sign. As of yesterday it still hasn’t come back,” she said. “It does seem like things are starting to even out a bit.”

As of Thursday, more than 18,000 people in New York state had died of the novel coronavirus, with more than 304,000 positive tests. 

On Thursday, while quarantined and waiting for the results of her own COVID-19 test, Frase cautioned people against the urge to completely ease social distancing requirements. 

“If we play this safe, maybe the worst is behind us,” she said. “Because nobody wants this. No one deserves to die like this.”