Marty Warrick first began volunteering as a Medical Guardian for Honor Flight Chicago in 2014 to honor her father and grandfather. Her very first flight came on her birthday, and she calls it a birthday present to herself because it was such a rewarding experience. She was assigned a “heavy-duty” veteran that day, a WWII hero who was partially paralyzed and needed a lot of assistance. She calls him a “great, great guy.
“One week after the flight, he sent me a dozen roses. It was the best day!”
Since that time, Marty has been on eight HFC flights, serves as part of the medical review team and assists with curbside check-in in the mornings at Midway Airport. She is well accustomed to saying Thank You to our veterans. Now, she wants them to know that “our veterans have to be smart. They have to ask for help. We need them to stay healthy so that we can fly them later this year!”
Professionally, Marty is in her fourth decade as an ICU nurse.
“We have a pretty fair number of COVID-19 patients at our hospitals, but we have been prepared. Our hospital leadership started preparing early on, and has reassured us that we will never be asked to go in and treat a patient if we don’t have appropriate PPE. And right now we have it. I am so proud to be a part of this system.
“We also had a conference call this week about the mental health aspect of dealing with all of this, and talking about how everyone at the hospital is doing. I really feel for the patients. They have no contact with family, but even we are supposed to minimize the amount of time we’ve got with them.”
Marty remembers first starting out in the 1980s when HIV was making its first large-scale appearances, and she draws several parallels between that and our current COVID-19 pandemic. “We had the same paranoias about not wanting to touch anything, the same lack of information because it was so new,” she said. “(COVID-19) is obviously much more contagious, but we didn’t know about HIV then what we know now.”
At the same time, the normal health concerns that affect us on a day-to-day basis have not gone away. It’s important to remember that in the overall context of care.
“We are all so focused on COVID that we can’t forget the rest of our patients. We had a patient come in last week with an acute heart attack. He’s 31-years-old with a family history of heart trouble. At first the paramedics weren’t going to bring him in, saying it was probably indigestion because of his age. Eventually they brought him in. Even health workers can get so focused on COVID-19 that we aren’t thinking as clearly as we normally would.”
After being involved with Honor Flight Chicago so actively, Marty is finding it “a little weird” to be the one of the receiving end of being thanked for being a hero.
“The community is bringing us food. A patient catered in for us one day last week. One night last week when we got off, people had put little pieces of paper in the windshield wipers of cars that just said ‘Thank You.’ Someone mentioned how after a shift, they just want to go home and decompress and not think about the grocery or errands. So gallons of milk and eggs and loaves of bread began appearing.
“ICU nurses in general get less recognition (from patients) because people have horrific experiences and want to forget it. Same with ER nurses, people are in and out. So when we get something like this, it is really special.”
Honor Flight Chicago is proud to extend the power of the words “Thank You” to all of our medical heroes in this time of national need!
“Our veterans have to be smart. They have to ask for help. We need them to stay healthy so that we can fly them later this year!”