Navajo Nurse Marquerita Donald Saves Her Own Life
In Navajo culture you don’t talk about death. It’s considered taboo. To talk about death is to bring it upon you. But what if you dream about it.
MARQUERITA DONALD: It was like all white. A hallway kind of. In the distance a horse was saddled with the bridle and everything. The horse didn’t move it just looked at me.
Marquerita Donald can’t help but talk about death. Her husband died in a car crash when her children were young, two of her four children died in their 20s, and she recently nursed her father in his final days.
MARQUERITA DONALD: It is hard (crying) my dad mainly was the biggest hit for me.
LAUREL MORALES: Wow (Sniffs)You’ve weathered many storms.
MARQUERITA DONALD: Yeah, I have I have been thru a lot.
This is 2 Lives — stories of people who’ve survived harrowing things and how those experiences transformed them in some way gave them new life. I’m Laurel Morales.
When COVID first hit the Navajo Nation it quickly spread. In fact the tribe had the highest coronavirus infection rate in the country.
It can all be traced to broken treaty promises by the federal government. But we could do a whole podcast on just that issue alone.
In the early days of the pandemic Marquerita was transferred to the Tuba City Regional Health Care Center in the respiratory care unit.
MARQUERITA DONALD: It was the bomb. It was great to talk Navajo to a lot of the elders. The interpreting was really fulfilling. They found me to be the only interpreter inside the unit. That was my main goal is helping the elders out.
The minute I meet Marquerita it’s like someone has turned up the dimmer switch in the room. Her bright positive energy is just so infectious. Here she is telling me about her oldest son’s birthday.
LAUREL MORALES: You do not look old enough to have a 30-year-old. MARQUERITA DONALD: (Laughs) Yeah!
And even though she has to suit up in Personal Protective Equipment that full-body armor every day, Marquerita loves translating Navajo — being that bridge to understanding for elders. She feels needed, important. And she is.
When it comes to nursing there’s more than a 30 percent vacancy rate on the Navajo Nation — There’s high turnover because it’s a hard place to work, hard to be away from your family. You’re pretty isolated.
DIANA HU: Because of that when you then have a crisis like this where nursing is absolutely essential it’s basically the foundation for all this care the nursing shortage becomes more acute.
Diana Hu is a pediatrician at the Tuba City Regional Health Care Center. She watched Marquerita in action and says assistants and nurses like her deserve a huge shout out right now that they’re really on the front lines of this thing.
DIANA HU: It's really hard to work with critically ill and dying patients knowing that we don't have a lot to offer them because we don't have a medicine that can cure them. We don't even have a predictor who’s going to do well who’s not going to do well. PAUSE When people get sick they crash and burn. They crash and burn.
Diana Hu is a member of the Navajo Epidemiology Team and says health care workers are stressed out.
DIANA HU: They're wearing full PPE we can’t even say hi to each other or even smile at each other because you can't see smiles and comfort someone physically which is important…We’re doing the same thing in social distancing in the regular population but I think it's more critical in health care.
They’re putting their health, their lives really at risk. Hospitals around the country changed protocols overnight. The Tuba City hospital was no different. Administrators changed patient flow, so COVID positive patients wouldn’t be around other patients. They set up an outdoor triage tent and alternative care sites for people who aren’t ready to go home or can’t self isolate at home. This was a FB Live video of Navajo President Jonathan Nez touring one of those sites.
JONATHAN NEZ: Good afternoon, everybody. Theresa was just showing me the copper tubes for the oxygen huh? Yeah. What we envision here, ladies and gentlemen, is to relieve some of the pressure at the medical center with patients who have tested positive for COVID 19 to free up some beds at the main hospital.
So employees had to adjust quickly to the new ways of doing things.
MARQUERITA DONALD: I was so careful at least I thought I was … But you’re kind of rushing because you have a 15 minute break and your 15 minute break break is cut into putting all that stuff on. you have to go all the way around to eat on the other side …When I got home I kept my dirty clothes everything in the truck in a bag took a shower when I got there. I mean I was on a routine.
But when she traced back over her weeks at the hospital there was one moment when a patient couldn’t hear her over all the beeping and humming of the machines.
We all know what it’s like to try to communicate with a mask on. It feels like you’re shouting and then you may not be understood. But with all this hospital noise, it’s almost impossible to be understood.
MARQUERITA DONALD: There’s a couple times when I was interpreting for a doctor that was trying to explain DNR for a patient to see how she wanted to deal with the end of her last stage of her life while she was still aware of the whole thing. When I was interpreting there was a couple of times I took my mask off because her oxygen machine was really loud and she kept saying, ‘what? I don’t understand. I don’t understand.’
It was likely that that precise moment when she took her mask off to be heard to help this patient understand hospital procedures that she made herself vulnerable to the disease
Her daughter had also tested positive after visiting Marquerita on Mother’s Day. So Marquerita notified her supervisor and got tested. It came back positive for COVID.
MARQUERITA DONALD: Even if I got it I thought I could handle it. I thought I was young or whatever my immune system can fight it.
Within a couple days she started feeling congested. Then came the fever, the vomiting, the diarrhea, the body aches, and the shortness of breath.
MARQUERITA DONALD: You know when you’re a nurse you’re thinking, ok let’s try this or this it just never took it. It had a different hold on my body. It was just crazy. It took over the whole body and I had no control over the symptoms.
At first Marquerita insisted on taking care of herself but soon she had no energy. So her son Tyler took care of her. He cooked for her, prepared traditional herbs, even helped her to the bath room.
TYLER DONALD: It kinda felt like taking care of a baby, I guess. Just seeing her vulnerable like that was hard.
Tyler said the nights were the worst.
TYLER DONALD: Just watching her trying to breathe. Just watching her in pain me not being able to do anything about it. I couldn’t do nothing! There was nothing that I could do.
Then one night it became unbearable she couldn’t breathe. So she got up, went to her son’s truck and turned the air conditioning on and put her face over the vent to try to push air into her lungs.
MARQUERITA DONALD: That night I could not sleep it was so intense to where I was hallucinating. I had what we call a vision that was a first for me… the vision was like all white a hallway kind of. Everything was white. In the distance a horse was saddled with the bridle and everything. The horse didn’t move it just looked at me. I told some family and they told me if I were to get on the horse that would be the end of my life.
But Marquerita did not get on the horse.
At first light she called the ambulance and woke up Tyler. The hospital was so far and the ambulance had to navigate a maze of dirt roads to get to her so her son drove her to meet the ambulance.
TYLER DONALD: Seeing her getting loaded up into the ambulance I got teary eyed. With the whole virus not being able to go see her when she gets to the hospital. It was rough. I felt helpless. It was just me.
They took her to a hospital in Kayenta where COVID first struck the reservation.
The doctor was going to discharge her that night until they did a last minute CT scan and found her lungs full of fluid.
The Navajo hospitals were so overwhelmed with patients they were flying dozens of people a day to Albuquerque, Flagstaff, Phoenix and Scottsdale. That night they put Marquerita on a plane bound for Scottsdale.
MARQUERITA DONALD: My sister and my family were worried and so my sister called the ER. She already knew where I was going before I even knew. She put it on Facebook thats how I found out I’m like, ‘hello! I’m right here in the ER why cant you tell me first?’
Down in Scottsdale they put a picc line into her hand and shots into the pic line.
MARQUERITA DONALD: The pain was so bad I passed out. They kept talking about a ventilator. They asked four times I said, no. I said let’s do the antibiotic first.
Marquerita had seen too many patients die after being put on a ventilator. Luckily the antibiotics started to kick in the next day. By the fourth day she could breathe again. On day five Marquerita had had enough. She left against medical advice and against the wishes of her family.
Her nephew drove her to Flagstaff where they met her son Tyler.
MARQUERITA DONALD: I did pretty good no oxygen I was like ok I can handle this until we got to Flag. I got out of the car oh my goodness it felt like an elephant sat on my chest. I was coughing and coughing I was like ready to pass out I was like, ‘oh my god this is crazy.’ Then I barely got to the truck I got in the truck and said, ‘turn the air on.’ So he had it blasting in my face and I was just trying to breathe. I said, ‘lets just go!’ He almost called the ambulance I said, ‘no I don’t want to go to the ER again. I said, No!’
TYLER DONALD: I tried telling her let’s go back to the hospital and get checked at least. She’s not one to be told what to do. We’re both strong willed I guess you could say. Me and her get in disputes sometimes. I tried telling her you left too early but she said, ‘no no let’s go home.’
Marquerita convinced Tyler to take her home to Shonto. But that night she slept in Tyler’s truck again forcing air into her lungs.
But she could feel the anxiety of just trying to breathe. The following morning she went back to the ER. They wanted to admit her but she refused saying she knew enough she could handle her own care.
She spent a week and a half on oxygen and developed her own rehab routine. She’d take bits of hay one slice of the bale at a time to her animals.
MARQUERITA DONALD: I started going to the sheep corral chasing down the sheep. Then I’d go to the horse corral we had six horses I would take one slice to one horse come back and get another slice like an exercise. (laughs) Sometimes I’d go for a little bit longer walks. I’d have my earphones on and started singing I couldn’t sing and walk. (laughs) So that took a while.
It took 6 weeks to completely get off the oxygen.
She flirted with the idea of going back to working at a Navajo hospital during the pandemic.
MARQUERITA DONALD: I really considered going back but I was too scared and my family was, ‘are you crazy?’ I don’t want to take that chance again. I would never go through that again. I practically saw my life flash before my eyes.
She’s had a couple epiphanies over the last couple months.
One resulted from her sister’s post on Facebook that Marquerita was in the hospital with COVID.
MARQUERITA DONALD: I was so mad at her. That’s when it really exploded. I got bombarded with calls and texts my aunts they just start crying. I was like, ‘oh my gosh.’ It opened my eyes a lot. My brothers were like are you going to be ok? It just made me realize I was an important person to a lot of people.
It took almost dying for people to show Marquerita how much she meant to them.
When Marquerita told me this I cried too. I thought it shouldn’t take a trip to the hospital to know how much you matter to your loved ones.
MARQUERITA DONALD: The virus gave me a different direction and mindset and made me realize the importance of living, especially for my family. I didn’t realize how big of an impact I was until that.
It was about this time that Marquerita started to pay attention to her dreams too.
MARQUERITA DONALD: My dad came to visit me. We actually talked like he was alive. I told him about my vision. He says, ‘maybe you should’ve got on,’ because he rode in rodeos. He always joked he was never a serious guy. Even when he was mad we didn’t know if he was mad or joking. We didn’t know up to his death. I was always scared of him. When he yelled I was always ok let’s do it.
And then in her dream her dad did speak sincerely.
MARQUERITA DONALD: In our tradition you don’t talk about your plans and he told me that I did a good job at the funeral. He told me, ‘thank you for taking care of me. He said, I was the only one who stepped up to it. LAUREL MORALES: It sounds like it was healing for you. MARQUERITA DONALD: Yeah, it was.
The title of this podcast is 2 Lives. It’s based on a quote by Confucius who says, we’re all given two lives. The second begins the moment we realize we have only one. So now Marquerita is starting her second life of sorts. She’s completing her life long dream of becoming a real nurse. Not a medical assistant but the real deal. And she finally has the confidence to go through with it.
MARQUERITA DONALD: I am not messing around. I applied online for the Aspen College. And I was already accepted the following week. In the last year and a half there was always a waiting list …and it just happened! I’m just going to do it. Nothing’s going to stop me now.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
