Since my retirement more than 20 years ago, I spend much of my free time volunteering in my community. I am an octogenarian retired school nurse, and volunteering fuels my spirit. When those opportunities were ripped away because of the pandemic, I struggled with my increasing isolation and inability to do what I’ve cherished doing all my life—helping others.
One of my friends (who also happens to be a seasoned school nurse) saw the toil the pandemic had on me and gave me daily homework as a challenge. I began journaling the pandemic data to help me meet my social and emotional needs. I dedicated my thinking to the group I knew best, retirees with questions I wanted to answer. My devotion to my New Jersey Retirees’ Education Association (NJREA) responsibilities kept me on my toes and it assured my family that I was just fine, although I did often wonder.
After months of isolation, I finally had an opportunity to volunteer with the Camden County Medical Reserve Corps. I would become a vaccinator as soon as COVID-19 vaccines were available. This was the spark of hope I needed to come alive during such a difficult time. Living alone during the pandemic, especially for seniors, has been very difficult. But I continued to write daily and sought out learning opportunities to keep my brain engaged. For example, I loved the contact tracing course through Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health where I was introduced to the new language of pandemics.
NJREA communications supported my work by posting articles that I wrote on the NJERA website for others to read. Some of my friends could see themselves in the scenarios that I wrote. My themes ensured that the retirees were in the landscape of thriving and getting a form of “reaching out and being touched.” Responses brought lots of humor from the readers as the year seemed to go quickly.
The 2020 holiday season left little to look forward to. There would be no family visitations, no church, reading books became hard, but the vaccines were becoming available in January 2021. And so, on 5 January 2021, I accepted a whole new challenge with new people, new procedures, and learning about CDC regulations and the COVID-19 virus. I became a vaccinator at the Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine! My world began to open up again; I was volunteering, contributing, learning, and finding my way back to doing what I love most—nursing the community. I started to look forward to Tuesdays and Thursdays because they were my volunteer days.
When I wasn’t at the clinic, I was reading and investigating what I would now be teaching others. I promoted positivity for others to get vaccinated as I taught vaccine after-care. I encouraged them to share their experiences with their friends and family to get vaccinated, too. Hesitancy was never an acceptable philosophy. I had confidence as a nurse educator that I could form a strong bond of hope and trust one patient at a time.
I have now completed six months of vaccinating people, some of whom were my friends—my former principal, a current administrator at my former school, and a secretary from my high school. Often there were a multitude of people willing to wait in line for me to give them their second shot. I used simple questions like, “Tell me what you have heard about getting the second shot,” which quickly opened the dialogue for me to address any of their concerns and build that trust.
As a nurse who loves the history of nursing, I have always wanted to be like the nurses who responded during previous pandemics, and now I have. In 30 years, what will be written about this time? Will it be written with a critical eye about how a virus brought out the best and the worst in us? The pandemic has ruined and taken so many lives, and I feel fortunate to say that for me, the pandemic brought me purpose again.
Jeanne Kiefner, MEd, RN, FNASN, NJ-CSN, is a retired school nurse from New Jersey. She has served as an instructor in two New Jersey university school nurse certification programs. She is a member of Sigma’s Delta Rho Chapter.
