Oklahoma nurse finds herself helping out in Wrangell

Melissa Curttright has been a registered nurse for 16 years - the past two weeks in Wrangell.

Like so many other hospital workers, the pandemic changed her plans. The 52-year-old RN from Oklahoma City said she saw 75% of her hospital's intensive-care unit staff leave, and then she took to the road.

She's been traveling now for almost a year. Wrangell is her latest assignment through SnapNurse, an Atlanta-based nurse staffing agency, after Los Angeles.

Alaska has contracted with an Atlanta company to send as many as 470 health care professionals to the state to help with the strain of high COVID-19 patient counts which maxed out ICU beds at the state's largest hospitals last month.

Curttright is working the clinic at Wrangell Medical Center under the state's 90-day contract. Though the Wrangell hospital is not stressed by high COVID patient counts, the contract workers will help take pressure off existing staff.

Curttright said she turned to travel nursing in January because she was tired of working COVID units, and the compensation was three times as much.

"A traveling nurse can make anywhere from $80 to $120 per hour," she said. "It's quite a bit, depending on where you go."

The state of Alaska is paying $87 million for the workers to help out at medical facilities across the state for 90 days.

Curttright said before the pandemic, she would never have considered a temporary move here. But when she got an email from a recruiter asking if she would like to go to Alaska, she said yes.

After accepting the job, and completing onboarding paperwork in Anchorage, she was told she was heading to Wrangell. "All of us were like, 'Where?'"

Curttright, who is being lodged at the Stikine Inn, is among eight traveling health care workers deployed to Wrangell Medical Center. She said she and one other traveler staff the clinic, and six others work elsewhere at the hospital.

An average day for her consists of work in the clinic, wound care, nurse visits and administering vaccines.

"They need a little bit of a break. They've been working a lot," she said of the clinic and hospital staff. "This is not a metropolis in the hiring world, especially for nurses."

Curttright said at the beginning of the pandemic she, like other health care professionals across the nation, were dealing with sub-optimal personal protective equipment.

Before COVID, her unit at St. Anthony Hospital in Oklahoma City was essentially an emergency room overflow hold area with two bathrooms. Then it was shut down and converted to handling cases of the virus, she said.

"We were wearing the same N95 mask for a week," Curttright said. "Our managers made shields from Walmart shower curtain liners and stapled them to a headband."

In the beginning of the pandemic, when patients worsened on a non-emergency floor, she said they could transfer patients out quickly to the ICU. As COVID got worse, her floor had to keep the patients who were deteriorating badly because the hospital didn't have any empty ICU beds.

A traditional nasal tube provides up to four to six liters per minute of supplemental oxygen. Past six liters, a patient would normally be transferred out from a regular floor. But "we were up to keeping a patient on 15 liters of oxygen with a (non-rebreather) mask on," Curttright said.

By the time a patient gets to that point, if they end up getting intubated, their survival rate is low, she said.

That was difficult to witness. And she experienced personal grief from the pandemic, as well.

Her sister-in-law's brother was a physician, a couple of hours outside Oklahoma City. He died last year after getting the Coronavirus. "It was really hard."

When the vaccine became available, Curttright and her son, who is an RN as well, got it the first day the hospital offered it.

"Was I scared to get it? Sure. I don't want something happening to me in a year. But I also don't want to get COVID," she said.

The Associated Press reported the COVID-19 pandemic has created a nurse staffing crisis that is forcing many U.S. hospitals to pay top dollar to get the help they need to handle the crush of patients.

The problem, health leaders say, is twofold: Nurses are quitting or retiring, exhausted or demoralized by the crisis. And many are leaving for lucrative temporary jobs with traveling-nurse agencies that can pay $5,000 or more a week, according to NBC News.

Curttright said she's seen even higher figures.

"Before COVID, a normal contract working 36 hours a week would have been $1,500 to $3,000, depending on your area," she said. "They have contracts now for $4,000 to $10,000 for 72 hours a week."