Major League Baseball reportedly scored a home run with its London Series games between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals. Charlotte nurse Suzanne Taylor and her husband, Jim, attended the June 24 game at London Stadium courtesy of her employer, Atrium Health, but before she talked baseball, she talked about how she came to attend the game.
Taylor has been a registered nurse since 1995, and the clinical supervisor over SouthPark Emergency Department since 2018. She put in multiple 60-hour weeks at the height of the pandemic. “We just worked and worked and worked, just to get people through,” says Taylor. “It was tough.”
Charlotte-based Advocate Health, the name of the company after the merger of Atrium Health and Advocate Aurora Health last year, used the baseball games to recognize health care workers for their service during the pandemic. Taylor was one of three nurses – out of the health systems almost 42,000 nurses – picked to attend the game. The other two nurses work in the Chicago area.
Taylor recalled the shortage of hospital beds and whole families showing up at the same time sick. As difficult as that was, it did not prepare her for when her husband of 31 years had to spend 25 days in the hospital with Covid after falling ill in August 2021.
“What affected me the most was not being able to see him, but also knowing what could happen. Scary,” says Taylor. She recalled how everyone was afraid of contracting Covid. It was almost like he had the plague, she says.
Insights gained over the weeks of her husband’s hospitalization helped her take care of strangers under her own care. She would remind patients and families to keep cell phones and chargers handy so they could communicate with their loved ones through FaceTime. She made sure to nurture her patients who felt isolated due to quarantines.
“I would spend time with those patients,” she says. “I wasn’t afraid to take care of them.” Her husband would eventually have a full recovery. She also recovered from what she described as a mild case.
Living through Covid as a health care worker reminded her of the time in 1989 when she was a nurse in an intensive care unit at Mercy Hospital and the power went out as Hurricane Hugo swept through Charlotte.
“That was a couple of days working around things. We worked through that,” she says. “This was constant. Every single day, every single shift. Entire families coming in all thinking they were sick.”
In addition to direct patient care, Taylor helped implement the system’s drive-through COVID-19 testing sites. Outside her work during the pandemic, Taylor also has been instrumental in improving stroke care processes in the emergency department and also with a virtual nursing pilot project.
Taylor was happy to share the London trip with her husband, who grew up near Atlanta and cheers for the Braves. Before traveling overseas, they traveled to Pittsburgh to watch the Pirates take on the Cubs. While there her husband got to meet former Braves player Dansby Swanson and the shortstop’s wife. They also saw the Roberto Clemente Museum, which honors the Pirate great who died in a 1972 plane crash while attempting to deliver relief supplies to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. In London, she and her husband had a special section to watch the game – Cubs 9, Cardinals 1 – as well as other events and sight-seeing.
So many nurses and health care workers deserve to be honored and thanked for their service during the pandemic, Taylor says. “It’s just an honor for them to recognize the work that we did,” she says.