‘This is my job’: Nurse at the frontline of Aussie emergencies
While most of Australia was locked down at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, Rachel Macfarlane was on the health crisis frontline. Working up to 15-hour days, the St Vincent’s Hospital incident response nurse sacrificed her own health and time with her family to care for everyday Aussies.
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For nurse Rachel Macfarlane, 2020 has been one crisis after another.
In January, she spent 10 days sleeping in a tent and providing medical care at a field hospital inside the bushfire epicentre of Bateman’s Bay on the far south coast.
Within days of returning home to her family in Sydney, she was asked to travel to coronavirus ground zero – Wuhan in China – to help bring hundreds of stranded Australians back to quarantine on Christmas Island.
After knocking back the 21-day deployment in favour of spending time at home with her husband, firefighter Ross Bramich, 43, and their sons, Zac, 9, and Will, 7, before term one began, her phone rang again.
In February, the 44-year-old nurse, an incident response manager at St Vincent’s Hospital, travelled to Darwin to support more than 160 passengers evacuated from the coronavirus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship.
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Twenty-five years as a nurse, with a wealth of experience in disaster response and emergency, taught Ms Macfarlane the art of being resourceful – that means trawling supermarkets in Darwin for goat milk soap for a picky patient and using water bottles as asthma spacers for children affected by bushfire smoke in Batemans Bay.
After 10 days at the emergency operations centre in the Northern Territory, the pandemic followed her home.
As she returned to work at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst in early march, a COVID-19 hotspot started to emerge in the Eastern Suburbs.
The fear and uncertainty she saw in Darwin was now in the emergency department waiting room. People wearing face masks and sharing flu-like symptoms or fearing they were at risk of testing positive inundated the Darlinghurst testing clinic.
“Every time I turned around there was another five waiting,” Ms Macfarlane remembered.
Ms Macfarlane, who also set-up the COVID-19 drive-through clinic in Bondi, would get into the hospital at 7:30pm and leave 13 hours later.
By the time she walked in her front door – careful to leave her shoes in the garage in case she unknowingly brought traces of the virus home – she’d often find her children were already tucked in bed.
Even when she had weekends off, she’d disappear to oversee the roll out of the testing clinics, which were swabbing hundreds of people a day.
“It was crazy,” Ms Macfarlane said.
“I hardly saw the kids.
“At one point, my oldest was like ‘I hate the fact you’re a nurse’. I said ‘darling this is what I do. This is my job, no one ever predicted this would happen’.”
Ms Macfarlane and Mr Bramich are among the thousands of frontline workers who will be honoured next Australia Day as part of a national day of thanks.
The special commemoration will pay tribute to the men and women, from nurses and firefighters to public transport workers and supermarket staff, who guided Australia through the health crisis.
While Ms Macfarlane switched into disaster management mode every time she walked into the hospital, she clearly remembered the fear and uncertainty among staff about how bad things would get.
Doctors bought their own masks and air filters from Bunnings, nurses locked up surgical masks at night to ensure they weren’t stolen and staff discussed reserving a ventilator and ICU bed in case one of their own was struck down.
Asked how she and her partner juggled children and full-time essential jobs, Ms Macfarlane pointed to a colour-coded calendar on her phone.
“Whoever gets in first wins,” Mr Bramich joked.
The NSW Fire and Rescue leading station officer passed on opportunities to respond to the bushfires so Ms Macfarlane could work and he could look after the kids.
“There are hundreds of me and only one of her,” he recalled.
He instils that selflessness in his children.
“I’d say there needed to be a little bit of sacrifice at home for the amount of work mum was doing,” Mr Bramich said.
Ms Macfarlane also singled out her sons’ school community, including the family who looked after Zac and Will when she was working and forgot to pick them up from after school.
“Not my finest moment,” she said.
However, Ms Macfarlane’s service to the community was not lost on her children.
One night, after Zac was told he couldn’t play with his friends down the street given his parents’ were still out in the community working at a higher risk of contracting the virus, Ms Macfarlane promised to make it up to him.
Zac reassured her that his disappointment paled in comparison to how “proud” he was of her.
“I said 'oh my gosh darling you are making my heart melt'," Ms Macfarlane said.