ProRodeo Sports News - May 15, 2020

JAYME PEMBERTON • Timer at the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo 2017-19. Pediatric flight nurse, including ambulance, helicopter and fixed wing for Children’s Health in Dallas. I’ve been a nurse for 18 years and have been in transport for 11. With this (coronavirus), we have to put on a mask, goggles, and usually we will have one to two pairs of gloves on each call. We have a flight suit on and then we put on a zip-up thing over that. The number on kids (with COVID-19) is lower than adults, and that’s a great thing, but we take COVID-19 patients. When the Ebola virus hit a few years ago, we had to train for that, so this wasn’t like, oh, my gosh. We knew how to put on the gloves and don’t do this and don’t do that. The hardest thing for me and other people is that mask. I don’t view myself as a hero. For me, I couldn’t do anything without my team, a nurse, respiratory therapist and a medic, we always work together. I feel great when we know we have helped somebody out, but when I became a nurse that’s what I wanted to do to help people out and know you made a difference. Knowing that you got a child fromA to B, you got them there safely and those parents put their trust in you, then I feel great about it. This is what I love to do. We work for Children’s so we will go ages 0 to 18, unless they have a history at Children’s. So if they are 23, we will still take care of them. For us on our transport team, we have an adult hospital right next to Children’s, so adults will walk into the ER and even though it isn’t the adult hospital we have to look at that patient. So, we have taken care of adult patients who had COVID.

Photo courtesy Jayme Pemberton Pemberton, left, had previous training for a pandemic due to the Ebola virus.

KRISTI EDWARDS • Wife of PRCA pickup man Josh Edwards. Radiologic technologist, Baylor University Medical Center, Forney, Texas. She sees every suspected COVID-19 case in the hospital. I do all the CAT scans and X-rays. I’ve been doing this for 22 years. At first it wasn’t too bad, and I thought it might have been blown out of proportion. Then, in the beginning of April it hit, and it was for real. We started getting quite a few positive cases. This is something you have been prepared for and trained for. It was nerve-racking at times, but never scary. Every person who has the symptoms, I touch every one of them because part of the protocol is an X-ray and CAT scan. I never thought something like this would happen. We have been busier with patients because not only do we have the positive patients coming in, but we had the people panicking. We have people coming in with allergy-type issues and fevers, and we have to suit up and test them to make sure. It has kept us really busy.

Photo courtesy Kristi Edwards Kristi Edwards runs scans and X-rays on prospective COVID-19 patients at Baylor University Medical Center.

ProRodeo Sports News 5/15/2020

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