Former Duquesne and WPIAL Olympic hopeful now a front-line nurse battling covid-19

Softball and baseball aren’t on the list of athletic accomplishments for former Duquesne and WPIAL athlete Anna Simone.

Track is. After a stellar stint with the Dukes track team, Simone made a push for the 2016 Olympics. She also played soccer and basketball at Mt. Lebanon.

But in trying to describe what life is like as a traveling nurse in the war against covid-19, Simone dialed up an image from the diamond.

“It’s like being a relief pitcher,” Simone said of her role battling the disease. “Relieving them. It’s your job to come in and be strong. Hold it down for the patients. ”

It’s a good analogy. She has a rough idea when the phone is going to ring. But she doesn’t control what she’s walking into or how hard the evening’s task is going to be.

All she knows is that the team needs help. And they need her to finish the job. So she’s going to take the ball.

The transition to the ‘pen

Simone is currently on a rotation in the greater Cincinnati area. That’s a long way from Rio de Janeiro.

And the glory and pageantry of the Olympics is even further away from what Simone is seeing on a daily basis now.

Following a track career with the Dukes that featured six school records and nine Atlantic 10 medals, Simone moved to Arizona and worked out full time at the Altis training facility in the 400 meter hurdles. Her hope was to make the 2016 Olympic team.

“As a senior (in 2015) outdoors at the NCAA East Preliminary meet she was 16th, and they take 12 (runners),” Duquesne track coach Jim Lear said. “So she had a reasonable chance. She was very good.”

“A great kid. An excellent competitor.”

A few injuries here, a few fractions of a second there, and the goal of the Olympic games was out of her grasp. She says she was in the top 30. But only 24 people are taken to trials. Three make the team.

Simone realized it was time to move on with her life’s work — fulfilling her degree in nursing at Duquesne. So she came back to Pittsburgh and got her license.

“There was a lot of sacrifice involved,” her father Dr. Sam Simone said. “She wanted to do it. And we were there to support her. It was a noble undertaking. We knew what potential she had and the possibility.

“How could you not support something like that? An individual who has that desire and drive?”

From there, Simone worked right next to Duquesne’s campus at UPMC Mercy Hospital for two years. After that, she became a travel nurse, and her first assignment wasn’t far — Allegheny General Hospital.

But with that job comes the responsibility of bouncing out of your comfort zone to go wherever things may be dicey and the help is needed the most.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all. She was always one for challenges. One who wanted to help,” Lear said. “The more challenging the situation, the more she wanted to be in it. She’d much rather lose a really good race than win a race easily.”

Given the relative lack of covid-19 cases here in Western Pennsylvania, she was assigned to Mercy Health Corporation, where she floats between five different hospitals around Hamilton County, Ohio.

For now, she’s living in a Residence Inn. With the current regulations in place and the lack of people traveling, it’s pretty much just her and the other nurses. For the most part, she works 12-hour overnight shifts in their intensive care units.

“We gown up for everybody,” Simone said. “Shoe covers. Gloves. Sometimes I double glove. My visor. My N-95 mask that has been fitted for my face. Then another surgical mask on top of that which can be disposed of once you leave the room. I wear a hair cover. It’s a big ol’ garb so you lower the chance that you are going to spread this thing as much as you possibly can.”

Simone says what she’s been seeing in her region of the world may be a bit more challenging than what we’ve been fortunate to avoid in Western Pennsylvania. But it doesn’t approach the battlefield-triage images many of us have seen on the nightly news from places like New York City.

Mercy Health hasn’t had to deal with that raw number of patients and overburdening volumes of illness. Instead, Simone’s challenges are more along the lines of expressing the severity of a loved one’s condition over the phone.

After all, part of the insidiousness of coronavirus is that its level of contagion is severe enough that family members are usually not allowed to be close to an infected patient in their greatest hours of need.

That duty falls to Simone and her teammates on the nursing floor. Part of that duty is communicating words, images, and realities that some can’t process.

“The hardest thing is trying to get a grasp of their knowledge of the status of their loved one. Trying to decipher if they understand what everything means,” Simone said. “We see things way more clinically. We don’t know (the patient) like they do. We want to be sensitive. But am I (properly communicating) how grave a patient’s prognosis is?

“It’s finding balance so that you are sensitive enough to the family. But you are being truthful and real.”

At the time of our conversation late last week, Simon estimates to have treated at least 40 covid-19 patients. By her count, at least 35 have either recovered or are at least still alive.

When those patients get better, those are the phone calls Simone wants to have.

“That’s why I do it. For the good times. To see someone pull through,” Simone said.

“If you work in medicine and you think there isn’t something greater than us, then you are crazy. Sometimes we do everything we think we can do. Everything you’ve learned, everything you’ve studied. And it just doesn’t work. Or you do all those things and the patient isn’t responding. Then miraculously they do a 180, start responding and walk out of the ICU. A lot of times, things are out of your control, and you have to understand and accept that as a healthcare worker.”

A reliever’s mindset

One phrase means exactly the same thing across three very different walks of life.

Medicine. Theater. Sports. Like that bullpen pitcher Simone mentioned earlier.

“Short memory.”

Whether it was Simone’s father talking about the need to be on point in his career as a vascular surgeon. Or her mother’s career as stage performer in Pittsburgh’s theater scene. Or Simone discussing her own career as a NCAA D-1 athlete. They all used the phrase repeatedly.

“Short memory.”

When things are at their most important — even if something didn’t go your way a moment ago, be better in the next moment.

Particularly at that nexus all of those disciplines experience. Where mental fatigue and pressure meet at the most crucial point.

Caring for a patient when they suddenly take a turn for the worse late in the day. Closing night and maybe you didn’t nail the previous scene. Or the last hurdle in the 400 meter when your body starts to get gassed.

“I try to pull from when it was my leg of the 4x400 (meter relay), or the last 150 meters of the 400 meter hurdles,” Simone said. “It takes a lot of discipline. That is not the time to start freaking out and stressing out and letting emotion affect your performance.”

Simone’s mother, Helena Ruoti, says that’s been a trait of her daughter’s going back to the WPIAL finals her senior year at Mt. Lebanon. She recalls Simone being ranked first in the region with a big lead in a state qualification race. Then she kicked over a hurdle.

“We were all screaming in the stands, ‘Get up! Get up!’” Ruoti recalled. “And she got up, jumped over the last hurdle, and still qualified. That was tenacious.

“Short memory. Something bad happens. Shake it off and keep going. Don’t bring it with you. She understands that.”

The call comes in

We had picked a time to do our interview last week. But, at first, I just got voicemail. Within the hour, I got a call back.

“I’m so sorry. I set my alarm. I slept right through it,” Simone told me.

The apology was more profuse than it needed to be. My mother worked for decades as a nurse. I’ve got an appreciation for the late nights. The 12-hour shifts.

Hey, it’s Nurses Week. Hit the snooze bar once or twice. No sweat.

We talked for a long time. What she misses about track. The nightly check-ins with her family to tell them she is healthy. What this experience has taught her.

California might be her next stop. Maybe back out to Arizona. Reminders about missing out on the Olympics aren’t a concern. Simone said the experience of trying is what mattered.

Then I heard her get distracted and some sort of interruption on the phone line. A text, maybe? Perhaps call waiting.

It was that time of the afternoon. Probably that daily call. Telling her which hospital is waiting for her. The patient load. The severity of cases so far.

Time to come out of the bullpen.

Time to take the ball.