SALT LAKE CITY – It’s been a year like no other for most professionals, but especially those who work in healthcare.
Despite all the bad of the past year will be remembered, because at least 2020 has shown us what real heroes look like.
No movie stars, athletes or even social media influencers. Instead, people who look like Mackenzie Visentin.
“One thing I’ve learned this year is how flexible and resilient nurses are,” she said.
Visentin is a nursing manager at Alta View Hospital and is proud of how her team, and all of the health workers, handled a year that they don’t really teach about in medical school.
“My team has chosen to have a good attitude during this challenge,” said Visentin.
Sometimes having a good attitude was a challenge in itself.
“There have been days when we were on our last nerves, very stressed – the fuses are very short,” said Breno Rodrigues, a physical therapist at Intermountain Healthcare. “But I think we ended up coming together as caregivers, as a group of people who cared about other people, and it reminded us why we became caregivers.”
Many of them said that the love and support they received from the community has helped.
But for a challenging year as it is for people in the medical world, they also said they learned a lot in 2020.
“One thing I’ve learned this year is how resilient people can be and how sometimes suffering can bring out the best in people,” said Cathie Randle, a home supervisor at Alta View Hospital.
“I think I’m most proud of my colleagues, from our emergency room to our nurses on the floor, all of them,” said CT technologist Chris Taylor. “We work hard every day to care for our patients who are really sick.”
One thing I’ve learned this year is how resilient people can be and how sometimes suffering can bring out the best in people.
–Cathie Randle, Alta View Hospital
However, a new year always brings new hope.
“My wish for next year is that this pandemic is over,” said LeAnne Blair, nurses manager at Riverton Hospital. “To be able to see my friends again.”
“I have the most hope that our communities will be vaccinated enough to open businesses and be safe with their families and bring our lives back to normal,” Randle said.
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic is politically controversial.
But for how divisive as the coronavirus, masks and vaccines have been and will continue to be, Jake Elkins may have the best wish of all.
He works in labor and delivery at Alta View Hospital and sees new life coming into this world every day.
“I have the most hope that we can all get out of this and learn and overcome our challenges in the future,” he said. “My wish for next year would probably be that we would learn how we can all come together as a human race and overcome our differences.”
That would be heroic for anyone.
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Alex Cabrero