UPMC GREENVILLE Nurses travel to help victims of hurricanes

The spent five weeks working in a military hospital and a disaster relief center.
By LAURE CIOFFI
VINDICATOR PENNSYLVANIA STAFF
GREENVILLE, Pa. -- It's a trip they won't likely forget.
Three UPMC Greenville nurses recently returned from San Antonio, Texas, where they worked for five weeks in a military hospital designated to take in victims of the recent hurricanes and spent their spare time volunteering at shelters set up for people displaced by the hurricane.
"It was something you truly felt good about doing. When something like [the hurricanes] happen, you sit there and twiddle your thumbs and wonder what you would do," said Becky Reilsano of Espyville, a nurse for 10 years.
Volunteer work
Reilsano, along with nurses Jackie Reis of Greenville and Robert Dunn of Sharpsville volunteered for the work shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit the South in early September. They left for San Antonio on Sept. 8 to work at the hospital at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, which is affiliated with the UPMC network, and returned Oct. 14. A total of 14 nurses from UPMC hospitals in Pennsylvania made the trip.
In their spare time, the nurses volunteered at the Kelly USA Disaster Relief Center, which some describe as a small city on its own.
According to the Texas State Guard, more than 6,600 evacuees were put in three shelters at Kelly USA, which was a former Air Force base. The base turned into its own city with a post office, hospital, pharmacy, phone center, numerous child care locations, and a Social Security and Veterans Administration office.
Reis said the shelters were as long as several football fields, and she recalls just seeing cot after cot after cot.
The two women say they mostly worked in the day-care center caring for newborns on up.
The most dramatic case they saw while volunteering was a 10-year-old child who showed up caring for his 5-month-old cousin. The children were eventually reunited with their family, Reilsano said.
Dunn said a good bit of his time was spent taking blood pressure and administering medicines. He was on the lookout for people with special needs such as diabetes and breathing problems, he said.
Difficult time
People from all areas of New Orleans were in the shelter and would often tell the nurses about their lives before the hurricane, the nurses said. But living in a shelter was becoming difficult.
"I think emotionally, a lot of them are strained. Some people had been sleeping on cots for six weeks," Dunn said.
"It was crazy to see how disrupted the families were. There were a lot of families that did not know where their distant relatives were, and their houses had been completely destroyed," Reilsano added.
The nurses said it also was a different experience working in a military hospital. The hospital was open to the public but mostly staffed by people in the military. They were sent to help because many of those in the military were being deployed to Iraq for the war or New Orleans to help with the disaster.
Reis said they saw many trauma cases, everything from traffic accidents to a bull riding accident, that are rarely treated at rural hospitals such as UPMC Greenville.
All three say they would volunteer again for a similar assignment, but not anytime soon. All three say they want to spend time with family before taking on any similar assignments.
"It really gives you a different outlook on life," Reis said.
cioffi@vindy.com