An Interview with Pulmonologist Corrine Moreland, NP on Caring for the First COVID Patients in Texas.
By: Paige Gavin
Date Posted: Sep 16, 2024
On June 5, 2024, researcher assistants Avery Nennmann and Paige Gavin conducted an
interview for the More Than a Healthcare Hero interview initiative. They interviewed Corrine
Moreland, a pulmonary critical care nurse practitioner, who worked directly with COVID
patients during the pandemic. Moreland worked in an ICU in Fort Worth, Texas, and saw
between 20-30 patients per day with about 80% of them having COVID. At the beginning of the
pandemic (2020-2021), the team of doctors and nurses she was working with tried their best to
get FDA approval to use different therapies and drug methods to help treat COVID patients, yet,
“in 2020 nothing helped the patient – they either survived or didn’t.”
Despite the misinformation spreading online about how only the old and those with comorbidities were
getting/got COVID, Moreland saw people of all ages and fitness levels become severely ill. It
was a scary time at the beginning of the pandemic for our healthcare workers, not only because
of the uncertainty and lack of knowledge surrounding COVID-19, but also because there were
few if any lines of defense against the virus. Moreland states that for nurses and doctors
working in the hospital, “our day was just trying to get through – see the patients as much as
you could and try to literally just keep them alive. There was no time to eat or go to the
bathroom – you just kind of dealt with it.”
Moreland mentions how saddening it was to see family not being allowed into the hospital or
other facilities to say goodbye to their loved ones. It was hard to convey over the phone to
family that their loved one may or may not survive being placed on a ventilator. The hospital
had a palliative care team trying to reach everyone who was dying, but patients were dying too
quickly for them to keep up. The nurses themselves would use their own phones to FaceTime
the family. The use of FaceTime eventually became the day-to-day routine for nurses.
One critical aspect of this interview was that Moreland had the first COVID-diagnosed patient in
Texas:
“The patient had been traveling – went to North Carolina for a work conference and came
back sick. He had respiratory symptoms, cough, fever, chills, fatigue, all this stuff. Well, just
the day before, the CDC had sent out email to us and to all the other main pulmonology
providers to say this is what [COVID virus] looks like on the CT. There’s a certain pattern that
the CT has that is indicative of COVID infection. So, it has a very specific look for the
pneumonia, that is what makes people so sick…. well, we did a CT scan on this patient and I
pulled up the email and I’m like, I think the same pattern that they said to look for. And so, I
called my attending Doctor, and we completely put that patient on quarantine and then
ended up having to get a first COVID test through the Fort Worth Health Department that
took three days to come back. And it turns out he did in fact have COVID. He actually did
okay, but was sick for like weeks in the hospital….”
As the pandemic wore on, Moreland encountered patients who came in thinking that they were
“vaccine experts,” who read things online and acted as though they knew more than the
nurses. She tried her best to give evidence-based education on the topic of COVID to the
patients she saw and kept families informed as much as possible.
“And sometimes you get through to somebody… or you get through to a family member, you
know, or you waited long enough, and they might be affected by it. That’s the other thing,
because, you know, they come in and spout all this misinformation. And then six months
later, they come back and say, you know, I had a family member die from COVID. It’s sad,
because you don’t want to say I told you so – you just want to say ‘Well I’m really sorry that
happened.’ And that sometimes that is what it sadly took to change some of these people’s
minds.”
“And I told patients, I’m not recommending anything that I haven’t done myself. And
sometimes that helps, sometimes it didn’t, but I think it was just more people thought they
knew better, which was just odd, considering nothing else in healthcare has ever stemmed
such debates to the degree that I’ve seen…”
Moreland explained to us that she feels that a lot of COVID discourse surrounding
misinformation is related to the election year. Coming out of the height of the pandemic,
Moreland notes that her work and personal life feel more manageable, since not many patients
are getting deathly ill, and we have better treatments to combat the virus. She sees the COVID
virus becoming like the flu, in the sense that it will be with us for a long time, and we will need
to get vaccines yearly for it.
“I think some people think that life just went back to completely normal, but I mean, it’s just
like a new normal but COVID, it’s going to be there. It’s not going away…Four years in and it’s
still pretty common.”