New Way of Nursing: How Nurse Ptacek’s job has changed with COVID-19

Don’t overreact.

East nurse Stephanie Ptacek thought to herself as she put on her safety goggles. She crept into room 420 — the isolation room — to check up on the first student who had reported COVID-19 symptoms since hybrid learning started. It was only the first day. 

She knows they were scared too. She couldn’t freak out.

If she overreacts, students won’t come to her when they feel sick. If she overreacts, she can’t help them. She has to stay calm.

“I don’t want it to be like, ‘Oh, you went to the nurse and she berated you for having COVID symptoms,’” Ptacek said. “There’s a stigma with COVID for some reason and people are secretive. I want kids to know that they can report symptoms, that they don’t need to be secretive, and we’ll take care of things.”

Looking out for the health of 2,000 students and staff members isn’t easy. Her school days have gone from kids stopping by to take their medication to sending one to two kids home daily and into a 14-day quarantine. 

“It’s just surreal,” Ptacek said. “There’s no better word for it.”

When Ptacek started as a school nurse a year ago, she was anticipating the regular high school nurse job — bloody noses, sore throat, upset stomach, at worst, a broken bone. But nurses have to be prepared for anything these days, Ptacek said.

“I don’t think any healthcare workers expected to be working during a global pandemic,” Ptacek said. “I’ve had to learn a lot of new things about public health and contact tracing.”

The Johnson County Department of Health and Environment (JCDHE) has trained Ptacek and other district nurses on how to contact trace — the most time-consuming part of Ptacek’s job now. She spends hours each day making phone calls and composing emails to parents and students who may have come in contact with someone who’s tested positive, wary of how students move from class to class with no idea of whose shoulder they brush or which doorknobs they touch. 

When Ptacek is contacted about a student testing positive for COVID, she works with them to determine any potential exposures on school grounds — anytime they were within six feet from someone for more than 10 minutes, unmasked. Additionally, Ptacek will send out low-exposure emails to those that had class with a student who got COVID, reminding them to monitor their symptoms. 

All high-level exposures Ptacek has dealt with were unmasked, most of them being in the parking lot when students were getting lunch together. It’s because of these small moments she emphasizes the cruciality of always wearing a mask.

“You have to treat everyone like they have COVID,” Ptacek said. “You need to be that careful with anyone who doesn’t live in your house and that’s how I work in the nurse’s office — I just act as if everyone has it.”

Having two involved teenagers and being on the frontline herself, Ptacek knows her family isn’t zero-risk by any means, but she’s not worried about her job putting them at further risk than anyone else. Exposure in a pandemic can come from anywhere; that’s why her family wears their masks, avoids places that don’t enforce mask-wearing practices and are constantly washing their hands — they feel as safe as any other family.

But her home isn’t the only place where she’s implementing safety measures. When you walk into her office, she’s put a table in front of her desk as a physical reminder for kids to stop and not come too close to her desk. There’s also a negative airflow machine right by the door which sucks the air out of the building instead of it filtering throughout the school.

Students also now fill out virtual nurse passes with their symptoms instead of having the teacher physically write out a pass. If they indicate symptoms like a scratchy throat, upset stomach or fever, Ptacek will email them to head to room 420 to isolate while she takes further action.

She tries to minimize all contact while in the room, using it primarily as a holding place until she contacts their parents to send them home. 

This former classroom now has a single cot in the middle of the room with a negative airflow machine as well. After every use of the room, the custodians spray it down to eliminate any germs. Ptacek feels she overuses the isolation room, but she just wants to make sure they’re taking every precaution.

“Not every symptom is COVID and that’s been kind of funny, too, because we’re so focused on COVID that we forget that all these other illnesses are out there,” Ptacek said. “We got really excited when a kid we thought might have COVID had strep throat, [and] you would never be excited about somebody having strep throat before COVID.”

Ptacek says, right now, a test is the only way to determine if someone has COVID or not, rather than suspicion or intuition. She says it could be days after exposure before someone shows signs of a temperature, and some headaches are just migraines.

But not every student can get a COVID test.

For when testing centers are overwhelmed, the district distributed saliva tests to school nurses, which Ptacek can administer to students who don’t have easy access to the testing center in Olathe — especially since cases are on the rise again and testing centers are overwhelmingly slammed. 

After waiting 30 minutes in room 420, the isolated student will spit in the test tube which Ptacek will cap, label and mail out to the health department, getting results back within 24 hours.

Most of the tests have come back negative — a silver lining Ptacek looks for in these tumultuous times. 

“I know [students’] anxieties because they can read the paper and they can watch TV, it would be naive to think that they don’t know what’s going on,” Ptacek said. 

Ptacek has been following COVID-19 since February, initially thinking East would be back in school following the week-extended spring break. But when isolating sick people and following the Center for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines weren’t taken seriously, canceling the rest of the school year, she encouraged students to look out for more than just their physical health, but mental health as well. 

In the midst of these trials, Ptacek finds it especially important to spend time with her family. She puts the phone calls and emails aside when she gets home to protect her own mental health. The time she spends at home allows her to be attentive when she is at work, so she can be present with her students in making sure they stay safe — that’s all she wants.

“Sometimes our anxieties can kind of flavor the way we treat people and at the end of the day, these are still my students,” Ptacek said. “I want them to feel safe and feel like they can come to me if they have problems or if they don’t feel well.”