Our Nurse of the Week believes what she sees and tends to trust precedents. “I’m not a big anti-vaxxer, I am vaccinated in every other area. But this [the mRNA Covid vaccine] was something that I just wasn’t really comfortable with,” says Oklahoma ED nurse Grace Zieba.
From her first-hand experience at INTEGRIS Grove Hospital during the 2020 outbreak, Zieba saw that patients succumbing to the virus tended to suffer comorbidities, or were very old, so she did not consider it a mortal threat to herself or the general population. “There were always other factors that had affected their overall health and I just kept thinking to myself, I’m young, and I’m healthy. And that was kind of my stance as far as even if I got COVID, I felt like it wasn’t gonna affect me as much as it had affected some of the patients that I had been caring for.”
Zieba’s view held firm through all of 2020, and when the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were rolled out, she still did not feel the sense of urgency conveyed by most of the news media. Also, the vaccines only had emergency authorization, and she had grave reservations about jabbing millions of shoulders with vaccines that were developed at a speed that was every bit as unprecedented as the pandemic itself. For Zieba, the turning point came as she started her 10th year at INTEGRIS Grove and witnessed the spread of the Delta variant.
“Some patients coming in were just as healthy as I am (sometimes even healthier)… And there are some that we have lost, and some that Covid has literally made them fight for their lives.”
Lately, Zieba has seen the hospital fill up with Covid patients who are not elderly or even middle-aged. Some have been in their 40s and even 30s, and are ending up just as dead as the 80-year-old patients who fell to Covid last year—and that has been a chilling wake-up call. “Some patients coming in were just as healthy as I am (sometimes even healthier)… and there are some that we have lost, and some that Covid has literally made them fight for their lives.”
With Delta in the ascendant, Zieba’s vaccine hesitance and uncertainty about the scope and targets of SARS-CoV-2 has evaporated. The new convert has been urging family, friends, and patients to get their jabs ASAP. “I’ve made the decision that it’s time. It’s time to be vaccinated! I’m not immune to COVID as a 40-year-old woman with no comorbidities and I’m not ready for it to give me the fight of my life.”
For more details on Grace Zieba’s experience, see Oklahoma News 4.
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