Tammy Venturella, a nurse of Rush Oak Park Hospital, is trained to handle emergencies. But nothing could have prepared her for what was in store in hurricane-ravaged Louisiana.
Venturella, a five-year registered nursing vet at Oak Park, returned from Baton Rouge on Friday Sept. 9. Venturella and 51 other members of the Illinois Medical Emergency Response Team (IMERT) were there for about week.
“It’s something that we’re trained for, but were never expected to do,” she said.
Venturella has been an IMERT volunteer for a little over a year. She and other members, representing medical personnel from around the state, were immediately deployed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich shortly after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast Aug. 29.
IMERT took three trailers full of medical equipment to Baton Rouge, arriving Saturday morning Sept. 3. Members were immediately flown via army chopper to Louisiana State University to setup a makeshift medical facility with 600 beds in the school’s field house and adjacent main stadium.
“We could have handled anything,” said Venturella, who had never flown prior to her chopper ride to the campus.
The team of physicians, nurses and paramedics treated more than 5,000 victims. The critically ill or injured were treated and then transported to other facilities. A good number of those treated had little or no possessions.
“We met people who lost everything,” Venturella said. “At this point, it hadn’t hit them yet. I don’t think they knew what they had lost.”
Some victims were exposed to days in the water, she said. Among her patients: a first time mother in her third trimester who vowed that, “she wasn’t going to deliver in a field house.”
She didn’t, and was transported elsewhere. Another patient, an 80-year-old New Orleanian, was rescued by Army personnel and brought to LSU. The weak but feisty senior provided one of the few lighter moments of the ordeal, Venturella said.
“[She] had suffered a heart attack. She looked pretty frail, like she had been through a lot. But we had this other young female patient there, who said she was planning to go to Florida after all this was over. And the 80-year-old said, ‘Oh, honey, you don’t want to go to Florida, they get hurricanes down there.'”
Venturella heard other stories, like that of nurses and doctors breaking into snack machines to feed themselves and patients, and of people risking their lives to save animals. The entire experience, she said, changed her.
“I feel so blessed. I feel humble. To think of what those people lost and what they’re going through. I’m not going to sweat the small stuff anymore. Even coming back to (Rush) Oak Park. That next day I was like, OK everybody, let’s go, we’ve got patients to care for.”
IMERT is a part of the Illinois Department of Public Health, formed in 1999 to handle large-scale emergencies in the state and surrounding communities. There are no immediate plans to return to the coast, said IMERT Administrator and Team Commander Tim Conley.
The members, he said, are ready to go back if asked.
“The team performed admirably,” Conley said of members, who had to sleep on army cots in the school’s hallway. “We really didn’t know what to expect, we were just planning on dealing with what we found.”
Among the things Venturella will remember the most are the people, she said.
“I saw people come together and work efficiently. There were nurses who were now jobless working around the clock. And the local support we got. They brought us food and water. You would think that they would be the ones needing help, and a lot of them did, but they were still concerned about us, making sure we were all right.”
CONTACT: tdean@wjinc.com