Nurse describes working amid road closures

INGONISH — Patricia Fricker of Ingonish spent about an hour of her Friday afternoon in a boat.

The licensed practical nurse (LPN) and continuing care assistant (CCA) was in the Grace ‘n' George for a watery commute to her work at Buchanan Memorial Hospital in Neils Harbour.

“They called me in to work on a Friday to work a day shift on a Saturday,” she said.

Fricker's husband, a member of the hospital's maintenance team, had been there since Wednesday after being called in to work when another member of the maintenance team got stuck in Neils Harbour due to a road washout. Her husband drove four hours around the Cabot Trail to reach the health centre.

“So they housed him from Wednesday morning until Sunday morning,” said Fricker, who is 47 and has been an LPN with continuing care for 26 years. “And then they called me in to work on a Friday to work a day shift on Saturday, so (my husband and I) were put up at the

ambulance base, at the apartment there at the (Emergency Health Services) on the Buchanan Memorial site.”

A park house adjacent to the hospital building is often used for incoming physicians, while the ambulance bay has a two-apartment building attached to it for housing staff that must travel in from elsewhere.

As a CCA with Continuing Care Nova Scotia, Fricker has been working with patients in her home community of Ingonish to minimize travel difficulties.

“We were able to see almost all of our clients once the Department of (Public Works) deemed the small side roads safe and passable,” Fricker said. “It's been chaotic.”

A TREACHEROUS DRIVE BACK

Fricker said she had a nervewracking four-hour drive through snow around the Cabot Trail from the hospital in Neils Harbour back to Ingonish to transport an INR testing machine for blood work. She said the CCAs' main concern was that patients who needed these machines for blood tests would have access to them.

“I actually drove it with my husband home (on Sunday) the four-hour drive on the way home over North Mountain with this blood machine,” said Fricker.

Her son drove them in a

monster truck with 40-inch tires, but she said they were still slipping around on the mountain during the drive.

“I won't drive on the mountain anymore,” she said. “That was too scary for me, I'm not doing that anymore. … We encountered snow at the base of Big Intervale Mountain, all the way up through until we got through Chéticamp, and that's where we hit the wind.”

Fricker said that she is going to be taking a Department of Natural Resources helicopter to work Wednesday, which is currently the hospital's only approved method of travel according to facility manager Heather Rasmussen. Rasmussen said, however, that employees from Ingonish who choose to take the Grace ‘n' George boat to work may do so, and Fricker said many, such as herself, have done so.

TOUGH CALLS

One of the more stressful aspects of working as a CCA since the storm has been the inability to transfer patients in Ingonish to Buchanan Memorial Hospital if the need presents itself, said Fricker.

Last week, her CCA team made the decision to transfer a patient to the Cape Breton Regional Hospital in Sydney for further assessment. Their ambulance has a physician and an advanced care paramedic on board, which means that the community of Ingonish has no doctor available for the length of time it takes the ambulance to transfer the patient to Sydney and come back.

“It's a tough decision for a nurse to call an ambulance for a patient (in a situation where) it's beyond our scope to kind of assess him without a doctor's eyes,” she said.

“In doing so, we leave our area uncovered for up to an hour and a half to two hours, and that's if an ambulance is available.”

Fricker said EHS is working hard to make more ambulances available for their area and added that support from her supervisors has been paramount as well.

THE COMMUNITY’S LIFEBLOOD

The Cape Breton Post spoke to Robie Gourd, asset manager at Parks Canada, who said that currently, the department's

highest priority is to open up a single-lane gravel road to reconnect Ingonish and Neils Harbour, as part of the first of their threephase approach. Gourd said this will take about one to two weeks to complete.

“It'd be too soon to open this weekend, but we're hoping it would be next week,” said Gourd. “It wouldn't be fair to the folks that have been waiting patiently for us to open the road to give an exact deadline.”

Gourd said it will take months to fully re-establish a two-lane highway, including with guardrails, signage, paving and painting.

“All of that is going to take months to repair, but we're working as fast and as safe as we can to reconnect the communities.

Gourd highlighted that Parks Canada staff are working closely with all stakeholders and levels of government to re-connect these communities.

“The Cabot Trail is, it's a world-famous tourist destination. It's a beautiful, iconic route. But it's the lifeblood of the communities that it serves and people rely on it for health care, for family, for employment.

“We can't understate how important it is to our community as well, like being employees on both sides of the park. But I know (for) the health-care workers, hospital staff, it's a really important part of this.”