As she pondered the question, it came slowly to her lips: "In nursing," she said, "you have to be an advocate for everyone.
Everyone. The people suffering in these places deserve every chance they can get."
After Katrina hit, and with the clear, decisive support of her superiors at Columbia Memorial, Coons scanned the internet for places where she could serve. One was in a clinic in Algiers, on the opposite side of the Mississippi from New Orleans. After a three day drive, Coons wound up lost.
"There were no road signs. I had gotten information from a staging area in Baton Rouge and drove down, foolishly thinking I could find a place to stay. There was nothing. It was 2 am. I started crying. I wound up sleeping in my car behind a strip mall in a dicey neighborhood under a street lamp."
The next morning Coons awoke to find she was near the clinic, if you could call it that.
"They were trying to re-open clinics. We did the basics, tetanus shots, dealing with diseases - issues of mold."
She said there was no leadership. You just made it up as you went along under spartan conditions.
This graduate of Columbia Memorial School of Nursing, however, had years of experience in Hudson that prepared her for this assignment.
And this task was her tune up for her next - Haiti.
The Haitian experience
"I signed on with Mercy Ships who were organizing teams to work at Mission of Hope. We were a group of six physicians and 12 nurses headed to Haiti," said Coons.
"Our hospital was created as a result of the earthquake and up until this point, staff on the ground had been using a school as a hospital.The day I arrived we set up a dome for patients. It had no running water, no toilet facilities, and little electricity. I was in team 11 with orthopedic surgeons from Utah and Texas."
The first week was "incredible" said Coons.
"I walked in to the makeshift hospital and said 'what am I getting into?'"
"I never worked so hard, nor felt so good, however."
Her day started at 5:30 am and her work could go until midnight.
"My primary role was Recovery Room, but with an ICU background, I was used in that capacity although there was no ICU."
Sometimes she volunteered to do extra time in the makeshift recovery room in her scrubs, hair pulled back, and a "Feel the Experience, Cape Cod," baseball hat jammed on her head. But that's the kind of stand-up nurse she is.
"One night, we had a man show up who was having a massive heart attack. We had an EKG monitor with limited capability. We tried to stabilize him under these tough conditions. We put him on the back of a truck to send him to another hospital. I am sure he did not make it. He was 46."
"No blame was assigned. We did the best we could." "One of the two other hospitals in the area would not do surgery due to the high infection rate. The other was at 50%. Our OR was the cleanest around."
Coons remarked how her training in infection control at Columbia Memorial paid off.
Her primary role was to stabilize amputees and those with crush injuries who kept coming after the earthquake because of after shocks. In many cases, they didn't have the ability to fix the crush injuries as could be done easily in a hospital here.
"This was such a humbling experience," remarked Coons. "You know, we are so spoiled here. People down there are still struggling . . ." she said, her voice trailing off. She mentioned how amputees were often given nothing but Tylenol after the operation, and had to rely on themselves to get back home.
Coons admitted that these experiences ramped up her belief in her abilities,
"I can do whatever the circumstances dictate," said the veteran RN.
Coons said she was proud of her fellow Columbia Memorial nurses who during Nurses Week raised money to divvy up three ways: with two local organizations in Greene County and Columbia County, and the rest to Haiti to help with prosthetics.
"There are more than 100,000 amputees in the country."
And there was Broken Man.
"I never knew his name other than Fritz" said Coons. "We called him Broken Man because he had been hit by a bus and had six extremity fractures. One of our surgeons from Utah, who came in here thinking he was going to save the world by just operating on people like Broken Man, wound up grabbing the litter to bring him in from the truck."
By the end of her tour in Haiti, Coons said that this top orthopedic surgeon was carrying patient litters, operating, and wiping blood off the floor.
Coons said he once remarked: "I'll never take advantage of my staff again."
And then there was the little girl who showed up one day, all alone. The story brought a glint to Coons's eyes. Coons remarked on the young woman's resilience. For more than six weeks she had existed with a bone sticking through her leg. Six weeks!
"When it came her turn to be seen by my team, the little girl looked right in my eye and said, 'Please don't cut off my leg.
Please.'"
The bottom line? "Everyone should go to a country far away. Then you'll know what superior care we have here," said Coons.
With nurses like Coons at the ready, we have no doubt about that.
