As a young nurse during the COVID pandemic, it’s no surprise Morgan Van Den Eynde suffered from burnout.
“We had been through COVID, but COVID hit peds late,” the clinical nurse III at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite said. “We are doing our best to help our peers, so we are sending all of our equipment and sending everything off that we can.
“And then it finally hits us on this delay, and we don’t have staff, and we don’t have equipment,” she continued, “and I was also at my year and a half mark. I’m taking care of kids, and I love my job, and it is rainbows and sunshine a lot of the time. But being a nurse takes a lot out of you physically and emotionally, and I had given so much of myself away that I felt like I was just kind of lost and trying to remember why I was doing it. We also went through a really bad run of loss of staff and loss of patients, and I was just tired. I was, like, I could be making a lot more money doing something different than this or, you know, I’m tired of being scared and I’m tired of fighting all the time.”
And then she met a patient named Phenix.
Phenix Cowart was a high school senior in Warner Robins when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, or AML.
The day she graduated, she was told a bed had opened on the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders floor at Scottish Rite, which is where Van Den Eynde worked. The two didn’t meet until Cowart’s second round of treatment, when the teen was wandering the halls at night.
“Everyone sits there in their room all day, so I would sleep after the doctors would be done with me, and then I’d be up all night,” she said. “Everyone else is asleep — the kids and the babies and everyone — and I like to see a different perspective as other people, so I felt like being up with the night nurses. They don’t ever have kids up with them. You know, they just come in and do their thing and are quiet, and I felt like they — not just Morgan — needed a little patient to bother them.”
“Phenix was the first patient to ever crash nurse lunch at 1 a.m.,” Van Den Eynde added. But Cowart wasn’t the typical kid on the floor. Just a couple of months from turning 18, she was only about six years younger than many of the night nurses.
“I kind of just ended up hanging out in her room,” the nurse said. “We were watching Netflix for a bit, and then she was just telling me about all the people in her life. And I used to sneak in and steal her hand sanitizer and her hand lotion, because it was so much better. It kind of started there, and then she would just be out pacing the halls and would jstop by all the nurses stations. I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Man, she is just a light.’”
The two would play cards or just hang out when Van Den Eynde wasn’t with a another patient or taking care of her regular duties.
“She was sarcastic and fun and bright, and sometimes that’s hard to come by on our floor, especially on night shift because it’s dark and quiet and our goal in life is to keep everybody asleep,” Van Den Eynde said. “And, you know, here comes the sun walking down the hallway.”
The patient-nurse relationship didn’t benefit just the nurse, however. Because Cowart was inpatient for 30 days at a time — during the pandemic — it was difficult for her mother, aunt or uncle to be with her. Van Den Eynde served not only as her caregiver, but also as her surrogate family.
“When I was at the hospital, I didn’t always have my family there. If Morgan was working or I had a couple other girls that were working night shift, my family felt better that they were there, because they knew them to kind of on a personal level,” Cowart said.
“It was so uplifting and such a blessing to see an extra face,” she added, “because I said bye to my family before I left (for a 30-day stay). But this was just an extra, last minute person to come see me. It was so good, and talking to Morgan is easier than talking to everyone else about medical things because she knows.”
The “phoenix” comparison isn’t lost on friends and co-workers. Although Cowart wasn’t suffering from burnout, she saw her plans go up in flames when she was diagnosed. Meeting Van Den Eynde and the other nurses lifted her spirits.
“Part of the beauty of who she is to me and who I am to her is that we started as me being a younger, newer nurse who’s really burned out and her being this teenager on the cusp of adulthood and freedom, and she had lost a lot and I had lost a lot, and that’s how our relationship started,” Van Den Eynde said. “And then seeing her grow and her take on challenges — and us take on things together — has been something that’s definitely changed who I am as a person and how I do this job.
“We prep ourselves how we need to, and we tackle the challenges that come up,” she continued. “When she relapsed, that was the first time that I had somebody that I cared about so much and had invested so much of my heart into deal with that, and it was like, OK, well we can drown in the fear or we can just take this one step at a time and welcome that you’re back in my life and I’m back in your physical space, and we’re just gonna dance our way through this and be happy and just take it on. And that’s what she did.”
For Cowart, there was a reason other than cancer for her being on that floor in that hospital.
“I without a doubt believe that God placed me at that hospital,” she said. “I think that that’s why I wanted to stay joyous and I wanted to stay uplifting and wholehearted and smiling, because I felt that God placed me there. Maybe not to help the nurses, just be a light that they might need. Like I said, I could never work as long as they do, for 12 hours at a time, sometimes more.
“And to be that light or try to be that light was what I felt like God put me there to do.”
Van Den Eynde concluded: “Your heart smiles when you’re around her, and I was just, like, ‘This is why I do this.’ I get invited into the lives of the most exceptional human beings, and I get to walk with them in a place where so few people have that luxury, and it just reminded me of the miracle that is this job.
“I’ve clung to that since the day that I started taking care of her; I really carry that with me now. I’ve been doing this job for years and I lost sight of it for a little bit. Ever since I found it back, I’m thankful every day that I get to walk through the door and do this job.”
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