HJBR Sep/Oct 2021

ON NURSING DURING A PANDEMIC Reflections BY Karen Carter Lyon, PhD, APRN/CNS-BC, NEA-BC Chief Executive Officer Louisiana State Board of Nursing Karen Lyon, PhD, is currently CEO and appointing authority of the Louisiana State Board of Nursing (LSBN), where she has regulatory and discipline oversight for 63,352 RNs, 7,633 of whom are APRNs. Louisiana is also the only state in the nation that regulates pre-licensure students’ admission to clinical nursing courses, and Lyon has regulatory oversight over 13 associate degree programs, 14 baccalaureate programs, one diploma program and 12 graduate nursing programs offering APRN degrees or postgraduate certificates. HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  SEP / OCT 2021 25 There are no more Thunderbird or Blue Angel flyovers. There are no more sponta- neous neighborhood parades popping up to honor our frontline healthcare heroes. There are no more friends and strangers hanging out their windows banging on pots and pans to recognize nurses, doctors and other allied health workers. There are no more celebrations. There is only sickness, anxiety, depression, desperation, fear and death. We celebrated too soon. We stopped mitigation activities too soon. We thought we were beating the contagion, but it had only given us a brief respite. It was toying with our fragile emotions. Now COVID-19 has once again roared its ugly head and is back with a deadly vengeance. The Gover- nor is disheartened. Our chief public health officer, Joseph Kanter, MD, is disheartened. The Office of Emergency Preparedness is disheartened. We are all disheartened as our hospitals once again fill with COVID-19 patients, our ICU beds disappear and indoor masking is back. THE PROBLEM If you read the pages of Healthcare Jour- nal of BatonRouge regularly, you know that I write a regular column for professional nursing in which I address nursing issues or issues of public health for our readers. That duty for this edition has been taken over by my chief nursing officer, Jenni- fer Wright, DNP. The editors had a special request of me, one that I agreed to take on, although frommy opening, you might think that this will be a desolate and disconsolate