DETROIT (4/9/2020) -- Former University of Detroit Mercy women's lacrosse student-athlete Jessica Snyder '18 couldn't see herself anywhere else. In a time where most are told to stay home due to the current Coronavirus pandemic, Snyder, like so many other former Titan student-athletes are doing all they can to help fight it on the front lines in hospitals.
 
Snyder, a nurse in the ICU at Henry Ford Hospital in downtown Detroit, has been at the forefront in the battle against COVID-19 ever since patients started arriving in mid-March.
 
"I don't think anyone could prepare for this pandemic," Snyder said. "My co-workers who have been on the ICU unit for 20-plus years, they are saying, this is new for us too. Just two years out of college, this is a lot to deal with. For me, it feels different, but I still feel like I'm doing my job. I just go to work and I'm a nurse. It's my job."
 

Snyder has worked in the ICU for close to two years after graduating from the University. She's taken more shifts recently to help combat COVID-19, going from three shifts a week to five.
 
"To me, personally I like being at work better than being at home. At home, I have to quarantine myself and I don't like being alone," Snyder added. "I like being able to interact with my co-workers and treat patients.
 
"I feel like I'm making a difference so I might as well be here."
 
Sara (Zawacki) Gifford '16, a former Titan women's soccer student-athlete and class Valedictorian who also works on an ICU floor at Saint Joseph Mercy Health System in Detroit, has also been busy on the front lines in the battle with COVID-19.
 
Gifford has also picked up more shifts than usual to help out, all while trying to keep herself healthy and safe at the same time.
 
"Our unit has been pretty full right now, but I've been trying to keep myself well physically and mentally because it's pretty heavy right now," Gifford said. "It's supposed to get even busier. I've been looking into volunteering at the field hospital one day a week, not only the change it up, but just to help out as well. My main focus is being present at work as much as I can handle."
 
Gifford, whose husband is former men's lacrosse student-athlete and Detroit Police officer Joe Gifford, said one of the biggest challenges for hospitals has been in the sudden influx of many critically-ill patients, among other challenges.
 
"I think the biggest challenge is the whole capacity thing," she said. "We've never seen a rush of critically-ill patients and so many of them. Also, just taking care of these people while they are alone. Often there's a lot of family and friends at their bedside to help support them, so we're just kind of doing the nursing job and going above and beyond as much as you can. It's been pretty tough to watch a lot of these people be alone, so trying to balance that nursing care that nurses are known for, trying to keep that going and being there for the patient, while also being totally stretched thin because of the amount of patients right now."
 

Ashley Mauser '19, who just recently graduated in 2019 and was a standout on last year's Horizon League Championship softball squad, has been helping treat COVID-19 patients during her night shift on the Medical Progressive Care Unit (MPCU) at Royal Oak Beaumont.
 
"Working on a COVID unit has not been the easiest," Mauser said. "Every shift is mentally, physically and emotionally taxing. On a progressive COVID unit, we see how quickly patients can deteriorate from this respiratory virus.
 
"With the visitor restrictions in place currently to protect others from contracting the illness, we do our best to comfort these patients who are scared and separated from their loved ones."
 
Mauser is another who has picked up overtime shifts as the rooms in Beaumont have filled up with COVID-19 patients.
 
"On a normal day on our unit, we are staffed at 17 nurses and have a 3-to-1 patient to nurse ratio," Mauser said. "To maintain our patient safety with the rate these patients' conditions can decline, we have changed to a 2-to-1 ratio which means we now need 26 nurses to be fully staffed on our 46-bed unit. This requires many of us to pick up overtime shifts and also many nurses get pulled to our unit from other floors. I imagine this will continue to be the norm for the duration of this illness, especially as the number of cases continue to increase and peak."
 
Former men's fencing student-athlete Austin Carlisle '17 is another University of Detroit Mercy alum who is helping fight the battle at Henry Ford Detroit as an ICU nurse.
 
"Since I'm in an ICU setting, I see the COVID patients who get very ill and often require incubation," Carlisle said. "The nurses have a very strenuous process of equipping and stripping our personal protective equipment (PPE) to enter and exit rooms to ensure we don't catch the virus."
 
Former men's lacrosse standout Jamie Hebden '13 is a third-year medical student at Michigan State in the College of Osteopathic and has been volunteering his time by helping administer nasal swabs for the city at the State Fairgrounds.
 
He said he's willing to whatever it takes to help out with the global pandemic.
 
"Everyone's pulling together and pulling resources and everyone's helped each other out," Hebden said. "It's definitely eye-opening to have a mass testing of a country for a disease."
 

Hebden, who is on break from his medical rotations because of the COVID-19 pandemic, wants to eventually get into emergency medicine and is set to start applying for residency positions in September, depending on the timeframe of the Coronavirus pandemic in the country.
 
"I know there's a shortage of health care workers out here, so who knows what could happen," Hebden said. "Right now, we are scheduled to start my next rotations in the ER on April 20, but it's really up in the air depending on if we have enough PPE for everyone and if there's still a shortage in the United State. If we are needed elsewhere, we could help out with other initiatives throughout the state."
 
"I know everyone is out there during this time, working hard and trying to do their best," he said. "If you could donate to any hospital or health care organization during this time, healthcare workers in hospitals would greatly appreciate it."
 
Not all former Titans are fighting the respiratory virus in Michigan. 
 
Former men's soccer student-athlete Jacob Prud'homme '16 is helping fight the virus in California as he works as a nurse at Stanford Hospital. He arrived in California in February, just before the outbreak. His uncle is also a nurse in the Bay area.
 
"We were one of the first drive-through testing sites in the nation," Prud'homme said. "We had a lot of surveillance done early. The Bay area was one of the first places to actually shut down, so we have our fingers crossed that it's not a calm before the storm and it's actually a real-life depiction of what's going on in the community in terms of not inundating us and surrounding hospitals.
 
"I work on a general cardiac specialty floor so a lot of our patients are getting 'elective procedures,'" Prud'homme added. "None of the elective procedures are happening right now because one of our cardiologists has COVID-19 and as of right now, they've canceled all elective procedures. Right now, we don't have any of those patients, so our floor has been pretty empty just getting ready for a surge of COVID-19 cases."
 
Prud'homme, who last year worked a nurse in Oregon and has worked in the field for four years, said that all of the different hospitals he's worked as has had disaster preparedness, but they never really have preparations for a pandemic of this magnitude.
 

"They always talk about things they are capable of," he said. "I've never had one talk about something they are not capable of, no one is talked about that. There was a real level panic. Stanford, during the base of this, invented their own testing system. There was some scrambling."
 
Mauser reiterated how important her classes and studies at the University of Detroit Mercy – along with being a student-athlete -- was in helping prepare her as a nurse.

"My education and my experiences as a nurse and an athlete have helped me so much in being a COVID nurse," she said. "Not only from a medical standpoint in learning how this illness affects the human body (as more information comes about from studies and the CDC) and managing the plan of care for these patients, but especially the importance of communication and teamwork."
 
Snyder and Gifford both echoed those thoughts on saying the University helped prepare them to work in the field, even if they were unprepared for the pandemic itself.
 
"I owe a lot of my success to Detroit Mercy," Snyder said. "I wouldn't be where I am today without the University. But as far as this pandemic, I don't think anyone could prepare for this. It's just something that you have to deal with, with experience. I will say my skill set and clinicals and theory, medically I was prepared for this. Emotionally and psychologically, I don't think anyone could be prepared for this."
 
"The nursing coursework there and some of the stuff that I did as an undergraduate – Detroit is a huge hotspot for the virus because of the health inequalities that we talked a lot about in the nursing programs at Detroit Mercy with it being mission-based and in Detroit," Gifford said. "You can definitely see that and appreciate those things. To not be hesitant to run into the battle because being trained as a nurse at Detroit Mercy has always been fighting for more equal health care. 
 

"That's been the biggest thing that I've taken away from the undergraduate work there. And just being a good teammate to the other nurses and the overall team."

"We need everyone to be taking this seriously," Snyder added. "I don't think everyone realizes how important this issue is. There are family members who are dying alone because they aren't allowed to have family come. That has also been something that has been really hard.

"As employees, we are supposed to be limiting exposure as much as possible too, it's really hard when you have somebody that is dying and you want to go say a prayer with them or comfort them. It's been different from treating the traditional ICU patients that we are used to seeing and we usually get."
 
Prud'homme mirrored what his fellow Titan alums and health professionals said in that he's just doing his job. He has no questions on heading into work each day – like so many other nurses and health professionals around the country.
 
"I couldn't imagine being anywhere else," he said. "I know a lot of my nurse friends feel the same way, no one is walking in with their chin held high each day. This is just another day at the office. There are a lot of people going outside risking getting it, but we are walking right into the trenches and we aren't thinking twice about it.
 
"That's just who nurses and health care workers are, if you're in the field, whether you consciously thought, 'I'm going to be prepared for a pandemic or not.' I would just like to commend the natural instinct of these people – they are just regular people who were destined to do this."