Like so many health professionals in Quebec, the hospital’s staff leapt into action to help people at seniors’ residences like the CHLSD Herron.
Staff at St. Mary’s Hospital gathered in the cafeteria on Wednesday to dig into a massive cake marking the hospital’s 100th anniversary this year, but some have had more than birthday cake and balloons on their minds.
A considerably more formal St. Mary’s Ball, the annual fundraiser for the hospital’s foundation, takes place Nov. 1 at the Gare Windsor to mark the milestone anniversary.
St. Mary’s had fairly modest beginnings, founded in 1924 by Dr. Donald Hingston and the city’s Irish Catholic community in the 30-room Shaughnessy mansion on René-Lévesque Blvd. (formerly Dorchester), part of which today is the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Ten years later, the hospital uprooted to its current location on Lacombe Ave. in the Côte-des-Neiges area.
While its roots were initially faith-based, the officially bilingual St. Mary’s, primarily serving the city’s West End, was to quickly establish itself as a community hospital providing its services to patients in more than 40 languages. In spite of the chaos so often synonymous with health care in this province, St. Mary’s has managed to develop a stellar reputation for everything from its birthing centre to its treatment of cancer patients to its emergency-room department.
It may be one of the smallest hospitals in the city with a staff of just over 2,000, including about 390 doctors and 700 nurses. But what St. Mary’s may lack in size it more than compensates with heart.
This was the beginning of the pandemic crisis when few had an inkling of what kind of devastation was to come but were soon to discover the grim details. COVID-19 was to take the lives of thousands in the province. At the CHSLD Herron, 47 residents were to die. Simply put, like so many other spots on the planet, we, too, were caught unaware and unprepared.
Needless to say, those St. Mary’s staffers who first volunteered their services at the Herron residence were among scores left haunted by what they saw.
Some four and a half years later, a group of five St. Mary’s doctors and nurses have come together as a collective for the first time at the hospital to talk about their COVID-generated, life-altering experiences. Their reminiscences represent those of many more from St. Mary’s who answered the call as well.
Dr. Julia Chabot was the first St. Mary’s physician to head to the Herron residence in April 2020.
“It was after reading the initial news,” Chabot says. “I could barely believe what I was reading. I just felt I had to help out.”
Chabot, 31 at the time, left her two children, nine months and three years old, with her husband at home and went to the residence the following day.
“I told him I would be safe and he understood. I am a geriatrician, and knowing that it was older adults being affected I felt it was my professional responsibility to go there,” she recalls. “But nothing I had ever seen before prepared me for what I saw. I quickly realized that I was not going to be able to do this alone, so I called upon my colleagues at St. Mary’s, and they came out, no questions asked. They all worked tirelessly.”
What they witnessed in the first major COVID wave were unattended residents in soiled diapers who were suffering from all manner of maladies, who were dehydrated and who hadn’t eaten in days. Those volunteers who showed up had little in the way of supplies and medical equipment to deal with what they saw.
Chabot was to spend the next two weeks at Herron doing everything imaginable in spite of the quickly deteriorating conditions. She would later head off to other hard-hit seniors’ CHSLDs to provide her services.
Nurse Lea Anne Hogan had no hesitation, either, when she first got a call from a hospital colleague to help at Herron.
“So after my day shift ended at the hospital, I just took off for Herron,” Hogan says. “I knew the situation was bad there, but I didn’t realize just how bad it really was. People were so sick. There was no staff. No equipment. We knew nothing really about COVID then. No matter, I didn’t think twice about going there. I had to do this.”
Nurse Mary-Lou Foley also answered the call to go without any reservations.
“I just felt compelled to go, but not really knowing what to expect,” Foley says. “I didn’t know exactly how bad it was until I got there. It was just sheer devastation. We had run out of gloves and equipment. All the patients were dehydrated. We couldn’t find their charts. We didn’t know where their meds were. And the place had next to no staff. So we had to start from scratch, taking care of people we didn’t know who were in critical condition and for whom we had no background.
Dr. Bruce Campbell, St. Mary’s chief of specialized medicine, came to the residence not long after getting the call from Chabot.
“I was having a day off when Julia called and asked if I could come help her at Herron — now!” Campbell recalls. “It was the way she asked that I knew this was a desperate situation. With a young family, she put everything aside and took off for Herron. She was simply courageous, so how could we not join her?
“But the fact that we were together with familiar faces with whom we worked at St. Mary’s made it a little more manageable as the situation really began to smoulder at Herron as well as at the other CHSLDs.”
Campbell, as well as his other colleagues, were not to have many days off in the coming weeks and months.
Nurse Rosetta Antonnacci, also a nursing-school teacher at McGill University, was at home watching TV when she first got wind of the disaster.
“I told my husband: ‘I’m a nurse and I can’t stay at home.’ So I went to the CHSLD in LaSalle to start calling patients and their families,” Antonnacci says. “I have lupus and am not supposed to go into hospitals, but I went anyway. My husband was upset. My kids were upset. But the staff there needed help. They were all so dedicated, the nurses and the PABs (patient attendants). But so much more needed to be done.”
So Antonnacci called some of her teaching colleagues from McGill and they started to train nurses on leave who could go into the affected CHSLDs. Then when members of the Canadian Armed Forces arrived on the scene, they trained them as well to go into the CHSLDs.
Of note, none of the five St. Mary’s troupers caught COVID during their stints at Herron or the other CHSLDS, but their experiences did take a heavy mental toll.
“I remember one day I was coming back from an all-day shift at Herron to do an emerg shift at St. Mary’s,” Foley says. “I remember sitting here completely shell-shocked, telling others that I couldn’t even explain to them what I had seen. There was nothing to clean patients there with. We were cleaning out bird cages of clients there. We were taking towels there. We were making chicken soup the night before and bringing it out the next morning because patients didn’t have enough food or fluids. One of the nurses would call families so they could FaceTime with patients.
“Even though we weren’t sure if we were going to get this thing or not, there was such a level of compassion. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. When I went home, I would cry and cry because I had never seen anything like that before. I kept thinking ‘we have to do more, we have to do more.’ ”
Adds Hogan: “I remember coming home after a shift and my partner was asking if I was OK. I told him not to talk to me. I just went into the shower and started crying for 20 minutes. I kept asking myself if what we saw really happened. We’ve all seen our share of trauma over the years, but never like this.”
And they’ve all seen plenty over the years. Hogan, Foley and Antonnacci have spent their entire nursing careers at St. Mary’s for, respectively, 28, 34 and 37 years. Doctors Campbell and Chabot have put in, respectively, 21 and six years at the hospital.
In addition to their work at Herron and other CHSLDs, members of the St. Mary’s team had also spent considerable time on special buses — transformed into mobile COVID centres — going around the island swabbing people and, later when vaccinations became available, injecting people.
“The key for us was working together as a team in a crisis,” Foley says. “Having that team support was so integral in taking on this task and running with it and in making it work for the clients and the community. We needed to act and we went in as friends and colleagues.”
“St. Mary’s is family to us, and as a team we move forward,” Hogan notes. “That’s the heart of St. Mary’s.”
The little hospital that could — and that did.