Staying home: I hope they know they're doing it for their community and, in a sense, also for me

Voices of the pandemic features people in the Seattle area who are on the front lines of the coronavirus outbreak.

Jamie Tom is an advanced registered nurse practitioner and director of clinical services for the Seattle Indian Health Board. She’s Diné, a tribal member of the Navajo Nation. She shared some of her experience working on the front lines during this pandemic.

The morning routine

This is usually when I think about my neighbors, when I go out to my car in the morning, and I see everybody's still home, which is really reassuring.

I always have a sense of pride of putting on my scrubs, a uniform that means something. And I'm still doing the work that I was meant to do, and I was called to do, and I do it for my neighbors, I do it for my community, and I hope that they know that them staying home, that they're doing it for their community and, in a sense, they're also doing it for me.

Culturally appropriate care

Much of what we do at the Seattle Indian Health Board is reinstituting indigenous ways of medicine into the healthcare system. And one of those ways is through smudging.

With a new virus, that might bring about plenty of anxiety, some fears, perhaps even triggering some ancestral trauma. So smudging can be through cedar, sage, or sweet grass, or any other herbal medicine, and it's intended to help ground us and draw on prayer to bring us strength and protection. It can help release tension, it could help reduce stress.

The work is hard in adjusting and adapting to fit the crisis at hand. But that hard work that we are doing is always reciprocated by our relatives, our patients.

We have community members who have donated scrubs and crafted face masks as well as face shields on their 3D printers, getting really creative.

One of the biggest gifts that Native people have is really the ability to create and to give and to show their love in that way, and every day I see that, even when it's not an in the midst of a pandemic.

The work can be exhausting

It’s the end of the day, and I’ve got a lot on my mind. It was a busy day with a respiratory walk-in clinic, tested several patients today and our last patient was someone who's experiencing homelessness. That’s one of the most challenging patient discharges that we usually have to manage here at the Health Board.

It's exhausting emotionally, physically. I’m really tired at the end of the day today, but I am ready to go home, and I’ll start again tomorrow.