Posted on 04/25/2003 2:30:48 PM PDT by CathyRyan
IN WHITCHURCH-STOUFFVILLE, Ont. - Pat Tamlin, a registered nurse with a cheery disposition who often bragged about her good health, had SARS.
Still, she kept it together as the potentially fatal disease separated her from her family and sucked the vigour from her 42-year-old body so that sitting up seemed a Herculean task. Together, that is, until her husband called with some news.
"Nicole has a temperature," Rich Tamlin told his wife from the home quarantine he was sharing with their 15-year-old daughter and her 19-year-old sister, Erin, in this small city surrounded by farmland northeast of Toronto.
"I just lost it, I just burst into tears and my husband was going, 'Patty, Patty, are you OK? ' " as his wife clutched the cellular phone, literally isolated in a Toronto nursing home hastily converted to a ward for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, off-limits to visitors.
"I said to him, 'I don't want her sick. I don't want her sick.' "
It was the lowest point for the survivor of a mysterious virus that everyone is talking about, but very few are willing to admit they had. Although her daughter is healthy, it's obvious the memory still rattles her mother.
She has spent 18 of her 23 years as a nurse at Scarborough Grace Hospital in Toronto's easternmost suburb. Working in the intensive care ward, she was used to seeing the sickest of the sick.
That description certainly fit Chi Kwai Tse, the 44-year-old son of Kwan Sui-Chu, a Scarborough grandmother now believed to have brought SARS to Canada after staying on the ninth floor of Hong Kong's Metropole Hotel. Mr. Tse was so ill March 8, after spending 24 hours in the emergency department, that medical staff had to paralyse him with medication so that he wouldn't squander the last of his strength trying to help a ventilator fill his lungs with air.
He later died, but not before Ms. Tamlin and other nurses went about the hands-on tasks of bathing and putting intravenous lines in the ill man.
Now in the know about the disease, but not concerned because she was wearing a gown, gloves and mask, Ms. Tamlin started taking care of another critically ill patient, whom she'll only call Mr. P.
"I knew that SARS meant you had to isolate, but I wasn't worried because I was wearing a gown, gloves and a mask. I certainly never expected what was to come," she said.
She took care of the ailing man -- he was cold, clammy and had bluish mottling on his legs -- and then had two days off. She returned on a nightshift that started at 7:30 p.m. By 4 a.m., she was getting cold chills and then hot flashes.
"I took my temperature and I never do that because I never get sick. I'm quite arrogant about it," she said. The result was 38 C -- at least a degree higher than normal.
Still, she took two Tylenol pills and didn't think much of it. She did tell a doctor, who told her she couldn't leave for the day until she'd had an X-ray. She was surprised to be met by the doctor and technicians in full gown and gear.
"I thought, "What's going on?" she said, adding that SARS was in the back of her mind but she dismissed it because she'd worn the protective clothing herself.
Despite a clear X-ray, she was told to go home and stay. There, her temperature topped 39 C. A few days later, however, she was still feverish and the doctor ordered her into the newly christened isolation ward with about a dozen colleagues.
"There were staff from (the facility) who refused to look after us. People had learned more about SARS," she recalled.
Ms. Tamlin's condition went downhill quickly, to the point where she was too weak to stand in the shower. She had to be wheeled down the hall for an X-ray and, on the return trip, vomited into her mask.
Still, she never thought she was going to die.
"I'm a nurse so I knew when I'd hit bottom and I am a young, healthy individual," she said.
She eventually recovered and emerged from the home after 13 days. The scare with her daughter Nicole lasted a few days until her fever broke and it is unlikely she actually had SARS.
Despite that, the family's 10-day home quarantine was extended for another 10 days. Ms. Tamlin was happy to find her family bored and a little cranky, but well cared for by compassionate neighbours and friends.
"People dropped off boxes of food and coffee and sandwiches. Everyone was great," she said.
Other colleagues weren't so fortunate. One, staying with in-laws until her family's new house was ready, had to stop working when told if she went to the hospital she would have to move out.
Another friend's daughter was told she was unwelcome on a shopping trip with a classmate because the classmate's mother forbade it.
"We had a great experience, relatively, but when I took my two daughters and a friend to Tim Hortons I told them not to mention the quarantine," Ms. Tamlin says."I didn't want to risk people freaking out. I know of a woman who was kicked out of a hair salon even though she'd gone into quarantine only because she visited a friend in hospital. It's terrible, but it's a lack of knowledge."
Ms. Tamlin, who says when she returns to work in early May she wouldn't object to going back to the SARS ward, only gets really angry when she's asked about the World Health Organization's advisory not to visit Toronto for all but essential travel.
"It is a safe city. The risk is so minuscule when this is a city of more than three million people and only a couple of hundred people have SARS. You'd have to come here and purposely try to get it," she says.
"The WHO decision is only going to make people panic more and that's not what we need right now."
This sounds pretty foolish to me. The point is not that most visitors won't get SARS. The point is that if even one visitor gets SARS and then carries the infection onto an airplane and to another city, the whole Toronto experience could be repeated all over again. You would think that a health professional would know better.
"Alive"
(Sorry - couldn't resist!)
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