Lynn Keenan, MD, is a pulmonary and critical care specialist who went into the military because it would put her through medical school. All she’s ever wanted to be was a physician and she can date her family’s involvement in medicine back to the fifth woman to become a surgeon in the United States, Marie DeVoll in the late 1800s. DeVoll’s model of both independence and grit in the face of adversity has stood Keenan well working in multiple ICUs, including in Seattle, Ogden and most recently at University Hospital MICU. When treating COVID-19 patients who are often frightened by both the disease and the medical interventions involved in caring for them, she focuses on educating the patient about their treatment to help them get through it.  

Cat Coe quit a career in mountain guiding and photography to become a nurse. But when she realized her ambition of working in an ICU by joining the University Hospital MICU fresh out of nursing college, she found the learning curve almost too steep to continue with. An unexpected invitation to climb in Patagonia, Argentina gave her the opportunity to reassess her work at the MICU and return reenergized, just before COVID-19 began. At first, she thought it was another flu, but as young people with no medical history came into her unit extremely sick—and getting sicker—she became not only worried for them, but also for herself, her partner, and her community. She had chosen nursing as a career because she wanted to be a public servant. In the face of a global pandemic, she discovered both the fundamental value of her role and, as the months went on, the price many nurses and their medical colleagues in the MICU paid in terms of exhaustion and burn-out.

Nursing for Rebecca Miller means easing the suffering of others, which she does by caring for the critically ill. What inspired her to be a nurse was her father, who survived two open-heart surgeries and a motorbike accident. As a child seeing his frequent stays in hospital and recuperating at home, she learned that surgeons do operations, but nurses save lives. Miller is a 15-year veteran nurse in University Hospital’s cardiovascular ICU and has learned much about herself—she has a honed instinct for the fate of a patient on first meeting them—and about the nature of death in modern medicine. But it was when she was seconded to the MICU to care for an Iraqi war veteran with the same first name as her husband, that Miller saved her patient’s life and as a consequence found herself in the crosshairs of both COVID-19 and the mentally and emotionally taxing nature of nursing in a global pandemic.