It’s National Nursing Week in Canada. As part of Sudbury.com’s coverage today, we’ve featured a gallery of frontline nurses and we also present this feature story on a local nurse, Veronica Denommee. We hope her compassion and bubbly personality shines through in this story, as it shines for her patients.
“An air hug is just not the same,” oncology nurse Veronica Denommee said this week. She was asked what it was like for patients receiving cancer treatment during the era of COVID-19.
The full-scale personal protective equipment is disconcerting for some and the need to maintain a physical distance from other people can be a challenge. But for frontline nurses and the people for whom they care, the inability to touch their patients is particularly hard.
“Patients need human contact — that part is really hard. An air hug is just not the same,” Denommee told Sudbury.com this week. “But we have to move on like this is normal and we have to make it as normal as possible for our patients.”
If you could speak with Denommee, you would know that no PPE could contain her personality: it’s big and boisterous and engaging. Her laugh is loud and infectious. She’s the very definition of a people-person. She loves people, loves talking to them, hearing their stories, making them feel better.
That’s what nurses do, and Denommee seems tailor-made for the profession.
So, it seems odd that her chosen profession was initially accounting. In the sometimes narrow logic of guidance counsellors, wherein career paths are determined by skills alone, personality be damned, her facility for math meant she should study accounting. Which she did. And hated it.
While studying accounting and working as a waitress to pay the bills, she served a customer — an accountant — who, in a single phrase, summed up why she had made the wrong choice.
“He said, ‘You like people. Don’t be an accountant’,” Denommee said (her characteristic laugh echoing over the phone).
Around the same time, her grandfather, an MNR worker who developed cancer possibly from years of battling forest fires, was in hospital, dying. She watched nurses coming in and out of his room, checking on him, comforting him (and comforting her), caring for a stranger as they would care for a member of their own family.
And something clicked.
“It was horrifying to see my grandfather die (but) something clicked in my head: I need to help people,” Denommee said.
But she didn’t quit the accounting course. She finishes what she started despite “how boring I found accounting.” She finished the course and immediately applied to Cambrian College’s nursing program.
Denommee was married at the time and her husband had just begun his real estate career, but the couple still hadn’t started a family. Despite being told nursing school was a full-time gig that would leave no time for a job, she “couldn’t afford not to” work.
She graduated with a 4.0 GPA. “If you want something bad enough, you just do it.”
Fast forward and Denommee is on her own for her first shift on the palliative care floor. Three patients died. A more experienced nurse offered some advice: Get over it; people die everyday.
That didn’t sit well with her. In fact, she was kind of insulted. She couldn’t understand that point of view.
You see, for Denommee, it was a privilege to provide care to a dying person (and to their families, an equally important part of the equation).
“They tell you things they might never tell their family; they get things off their chest; they tell you these amazing stories about their lives,” she said, illustrating how the care nurses provide goes far beyond the physical. “I feel like it’s a privilege: you’re there at a pivotal moment. But it’s also hard (because) you get to know these people like you’re a member of their family.”
After a few years and during Denommee’s second pregnancy, the emotional toll became too much, “too raw.” So she made a major switch and went to work for Barr Plastic Surgery.
A little over six years passed. Her kids were a little older. She heard the Northern Cancer Centre was hiring. For Denommee, that was a dream job. She had long wanted to work in oncology. Some people question why she would want to work with patients who are literally fighting for their lives. Some people believe — incorrectly in Denommee’s estimation — that the Cancer Centre is a depressing place. It’s not, she said.
“It’s a beautiful collaboration,” she said, with everyone, patients and nurses, focussed on a single goal: getting better. “The atmosphere in the Cancer Centre is uplifting, hopeful.”
That’s not to say there aren’t tears; there are, but there are also smiles and laughter and camaraderie.
The pandemic, though, creates its own unique kind of sadness. Denommee said for patients whose prognosis isn’t favourable, COVID-19 means items in their bucket list will likely have to stay in the bucket.
Denommee cried recalling one patient in particular who was given a year to live and had planned a big farewell trip with their spouse. Because of COVID-19, that dream will go sadly unfulfilled.
COVID-19 also means people, particularly patients who are immuno-compromised, are nervous about going into the hospital. Denommee understands that, and said she and her fellow nurses do their best to set patients’ minds at ease.
The fact she and the other nurses feel safe coming to work plays a big role in helping her patients feel more comfortable, Denommee said. She added patients and families show such appreciation and gratitude for frontline health-care workers providing care in the face of an invisible threat.
“The thank yous we get are unbelievable,” she said.
Her family, especially her teenage children, do fear for her health and safety as she works amidst the pandemic. Her daughter looks to spend time with her in the morning over a cup of tea and her son told her he was nervous about her going to the hospital.
But, like she does with her patients, Denommee’s bubbly, take-it-all-in-stride demeanour helps set their minds at ease.
In a way, the job itself is therapeutic.
“It’s very rewarding. You can’t go in complaining about your life when these people are fighting for theirs."
