Today was an exciting day for Rosie the Respirators and their collaborators in Rio Arriba County. We loaded fifteen beds, one hundred twenty-three gowns, and sixty 3-D printed N95 masks on a truck bound for Rehoboth McKinley Christian Hospital (RMCH) in Gallup, serving the Navajo Nation and New Mexico’s western pueblos.
McKinley County in northwestern New Mexico is a hot spot for corona virus. They have 416 confirmed cases and have been increasing at a rate of about 50 per day. Native Americans make up 37% of New Mexico’s Covid-19 cases although they only make up 10% of the population. Most of these cases are clustered in the northwest quadrant of the state. The impact of Corona virus on New Mexico’s Native Americans is well-documented in this PBS Town Hall.
I reached out to Rehoboth McKinley about a week ago to see if we could help.
About eighteen months ago, Christopher Madrid, the County’s Economic Development Director, spearheaded a project to purchase a defunct nursing home in order to turn it into a substance abuse treatment facility. There were approximately 100 hospital beds in the building. They are the old hand crank variety but will do in a pinch. When it became clear that hospitals throughout northern NM would have to expand capacity to handle the Covid surge, Chris asked me if I thought any hospitals might be able to use the beds.
We immediately offered 35 to Presbyterian Española, our own County Hospital, helping it to expand from two ICU beds with ventilators to eighteen. Chris is from Taos, and 20 were given to Taos Holy Cross. I was alarmed by the ferocity of the epidemic in Navajo country, and began calling McKinley Rehoboth, badgering the front desk until they found me a live human being.
Her name was Ina Burmeister and she was very excited about the offer of beds and protective gear.
“The only catch,” I told her, “is that I don’t know how to get them to you.” Gallup is about five to six hours away from Española and Rio Arriba County doesn’t have any large trucks.
“We’ll come for them,” she responded. “One of our staff has a brother who owns a moving company in Las Cruces. He’ll pick them up and bring them.”
We both laughed. Las Cruces is six hours away from both Española and Gallup in a completely different direction.
The truck arrived Tuesday. Unfortunately, Christopher and I couldn’t participate. I was on a Zoom call between my department and one of our funders. Christopher was on a different call. But my bosses all met the truck and helped to move beds.
We also loaded up 123 gowns made by one of our Rosie the Respirators, Stella Shelburn. Stella is a hairdresser and entrepreneur who made 800 plastic gowns to sell to other hairdressers several decades ago. Then she decided she didn’t like marketing so they sat in her shed until we retrieved them for use by medical providers. We threw in some face shields printed by Steve Cox at Northern New Mexico Community College. Our County EMS director, Alfredo Montoya, included PPEs of his own.
Bill Camarota, an RMCH official, expressed his excitement to Rio Arriba County Commission Chairman Leo Jaramillo in the video below. “I tell you what’s gonna come from this is the residual effect of all this togetherness. When this is all over, it’s gonna be a different way of thinking, You watch!”