Moon Township, Pa. - Emily Carlo was used to getting cheers on the lacrosse field.
In her four years with the Colonials from 2009-2012, Carlo appeared in 57 games for Robert Morris, a stalwart defender who helped her squad earn 31 victories over a four year stretch including a trip to the 2011 NEC Tournament.
Eight years removed from her final game in the red and blue, the Harmony, Pa. native is earning a new kind of praise for her defense against the spread of COVID-19.
A nurse at the Sutter Health Mills-Peninsula Medical Center in San Mateo County, California, Carlo and her fellow health professionals are finally starting to receive their due appreciation for what is so often a thankless job.
"It's definitely kind of a weird sort of added attention that doctors and nurses are starting to get since all of this started," Carlo said. "Every day, we're going in there and risking a lot every day. You never know what someone is going to walk in the door with. It kind of puts a new light on us, but there's definitely been a lot of appreciation from people for what we've been doing."
Working on a med-surge vascular and neurology floor at Mills-Peninsula just outside of San Francisco, Carlo saw her hospital transformed almost overnight as the spread of Coronavirus continued to mount in the first few weeks of the outbreak.
The change served to hi-light the incredible stress and strain many hospitals find themselves under as they cope with a global pandemic.
"Originally we had one unit as a COVID unit, and as a travel nurse I was floating down there alot," Carlo said. "Now we have closed off another unit, and they're staffing it with a whole other floor's staff. In the beginning, it was changing every day. You would need to wear certain things as PPE, and then the next day the CDC would say you don't need to do that. Literally every day when you walked in you don't know what the rules or procedure are going to be."
Carlo and the rest of the staff are now required to have their temperatures taken every time they enter the hospital, one of many new procedures the hospital is undertaking to ensure the virus remains under control.
And while Mills-Pennsiula staff as well as the country at large are still in the middle of the fight, they are at least finally starting to be recognizer for their contributions.
"It is nice to sometimes get that sort of recognition, because sometime I sort of feel overworked, but this is our job. We don't ask for recognition, we're there because we want to work and we want to help people, but it is interesting to see how much more people have started to take notice," Carlo said.
