Isolated from everyone but healthcare workers clad in PPE and denied the comfort of family visits, COVID-19 patients exist in a lonely world. Nurse of the Week Marc Perreault uses his musical gifts to try to bring a little intimacy and warmth into their lives. “You really do kind of get to know them and their ins and outs and their intricacies as human beings,” he said. “It [even] brings me a lot of comfort…. It really just kind of lightens the day and brings some levity to the day-to-day.”
As often as not, Marc’s voice moves his colleagues as well as their patients. One co-worker comments, “You’d walk by the room to see what’s going on, and there’s Marc singing to his patients. It just touched all of us. It was just such an amazing moment.”
Marc, who performs in a four-piece folk band, is a firm believer in the restorative power of music. He relates,”One thing that’s important for me is to share messages of hope. About a year ago, I cared for one patient who spent about a month under sedation. When she came out and transferred off the unit, she said, ‘that’s the guy who is always singing. I remembered him.'”
As with all of us, the pandemic has profoundly affected Perreault, an RN at UCHealth Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs. While spending most of his time working in the ICU since the outbreak, he has been striving to make sense of his experiences, and hopes to find meaning in them by exercising his creativity. He says, “I’ve got like half a dozen half-written songs from all of this. The hope is that we can pull it all together in the end and make something beautiful out of something that’s kind of ugly.”
For more on Marc Perreault, see the story and video at 9News in Colorado Springs.
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