Sept. 8, 2020
When the chance to help patients infected by COVID-19 presented itself, Rebecca Berry didn’t hesitate.
“As long as anyone on my team was fighting in the trenches, I was going to help them,” Rebecca recalls. “I felt called as a leader to lead by example.”
A Parkland employee for six years, Rebecca temporarily left her role as an associate unit manager to volunteer on the frontlines of the pandemic in Parkland’s Tactical Care Unit (TCU).
As a resource nurse, Rebecca worked shifts as long as 14 hours. And that meant making a lot of personal sacrifices. Recently married, she was not able to hold her 7-month-old daughter, Charlotte, for two months. She even missed her first Mother’s Day.
When her shifts ended, Rebecca self-isolated in a RV instead of her home so she wouldn’t risk spreading the virus to her family. Then once she was well rested, she would return to the TCU to do it all over again.
There were times when patients spiked fevers so high that Rebecca and her teams would fill bags of ice to lay on them, anything to bring the fevers down. Other moments were much happier, like when one of her patients finally came off her ventilator.
“The day she was being discharged, it was such a joyous moment seeing her reunited with her family,” she said.
Today, Rebecca is happy to be reunited with her own family. But she would be more than happy to volunteer again.
“I have so much love and respect for the people in that unit,” she added. “They came together to be part of a solution in a world full of problems.”
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