After a COVID loss, Macon ICU nurse gets Christmas surprise for family — the vaccine
The vaccine was to be a surprise, a Christmas gift from the nurse to her family.
And, when you think about it, to her patients.
Laney Hogan had not told her relatives that on her off day ,Christmas Eve morning at the hospital where she works, that she would roll up the holly-green left sleeve of her “Merry Christmas Y’all” shirt and be among the first people in Middle Georgia to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
Hogan, 52, a registered nurse in the ICU at Coliseum Medical Centers for the past decade and a half, had mentioned to them that she might get the shot. But she kept it secret that she was being vaccinated.
For many in her line of work, the nine months of the coronavirus pandemic had trudged by, a long, slow blur of lives in the balance. Their own included.
For Hogan, the virus hit particularly hard.
Not only did she see how it ravaged those in its clutches, she dealt with the death of her 81-year-old mother-in-law, who died after contracting it over the summer.
Her mother-in-law fell ill the first week of August.
Four days later, after going on a ventilator, she was dead.
“We miss her a lot this Christmas,” said Hogan, who is part of a team at Coliseum that has treated many COVID patients, some of whom have lost the battle.
“This is kind of a no-see-it disease,” she said. “You don’t understand it until it happens to you.”
Hogan grew up in Jones County, where her mother and grandmother were nurses. Hogan never considered a career doing anything else.
“I think back to when my grandmother was a nurse and all the vaccines they had to experience,” Hogan said. “She was born in 1906, and I felt like if she weathered all that, that we should do our part to make sure everybody’s cared for.”
When word came that Coliseum hospital would make the Moderna vaccine available to employees, Hogan told herself, “I’m not 20 anymore.”
Having seen COVID patients suffer, she figured, “I’m not gonna go through that.”
“And if this will help in any kind of way,” she said of being vaccinated, “that’s what I’m willing to do. To keep myself safe and my family around me. I want to see my parents and be safe with them, and for them to feel comfortable that I’ve done what I need to do to protect them and my own family.”
She added: “You want to be an example.”
So on Thursday at 10:54 a.m., Hogan rolled up her left sleeve.
A nurse she knows named Ben Kerscher, clad in a white lab coat with a candy cane poking out the breast pocket, prepared a syringe.
He swabbed Hogan’s upper arm and, needle in hand, said, “One, two, three.”
In the vaccine went.
Kerscher counted to 10 and pulled the needle out.
He told Hogan there were cookies and snacks in the hallway.
He even joked that she could have the candy cane in his pocket for being a good patient.
Hogan declined.
She had her gift now.
“A good merry Christmas,” she called it, “to have gotten this present.”