Ramona resident Melissa Dreyer Mallon has become adept at managing the highs and lows of caring for COVID-19 patients while working in a hospital’s intensive care unit over the past six months.
Covered from head to foot in protective gear, including an N-95 mask, gown, gloves, hair cover and face shield, the registered nurse helps tend to very ill patients at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Hillcrest. Sometimes just turning these patients in their bed leads to blood pressure and oxygen level drops that create an hour-long recovery process.
“This is nothing like I’ve ever seen,” said Mallon, who gets help turning intubated and sedated patients onto their stomachs to help their lungs expand. “These patients are very sick and fluctuate very quickly in their hospital course. Everybody was stressed at the beginning of COVID, but the way Scripps has handled it has been reassuring.”
Mallon volunteered to assistant COVID-19 patients right from the start of the first arrivals, in part because she feels protected by the equipment. Even though there’s danger of catching a highly contagious disease from the patients, Mallon says she’s only known of a few hospital workers who have contracted coronavirus, and most of those encounters happened outside the health care facility.
Mallon said she is one of only a few staff allowed to enter the COVID-19 patients’ rooms to limit their exposure. Others who can help are a respiratory therapist and ICU intensivist. They take extra precautions such as UV sterilizing the rooms, tossing out reusable items and double-bagging the trash. After work, she follows a strict routine of changing out of scrubs at the hospital, replacing her hospital shoes with a separate pair kept in a Tupperware container in her car, then removing her clothes and showering as soon as she arrives home.
“It’s a whole process that’s exhausting,” she said. “We’re very protected so it’s very hard to get COVID unless we’re exposed to somebody who we don’t know is positive, but the hospital pretty much tests every patient.”
One of the challenges for COVID patients is not being able to see visitors, so Mallon helps support them and their families by sharing iPads provided by Scripps Health.
“The staff can Skype with the patients’ families and if the patients are alert and oriented we can bring the iPads into them and they can see their families virtually,” she said.
Mallon also gets the benefit of using donated Littmann stethoscopes. She said these specialized stethoscopes make it easier to hear the patients’ breathing sounds when it would otherwise be difficult to do so because they are located in negative pressure rooms.
Melissa and Torey Mallon with their children, from left, Carrington, Asher and Grey.
(Courtesy photo)
Raised in Ramona, Mallon graduated from Ramona High School in 2004. Afterward, she studied for two years at Mt. San Antonio College in Pomona, Calif. When she moved back to Ramona in 2006 because she likes the small town atmosphere, she started working at VCA Adobe Animal Hospital as a veterinary assistant. The work was familiar to her after raising sheep, veal and steers for 4-H and Future Farmers of America in her youth.
She felt the pull of a nursing career as her grandmother, brother and sister did the same. After studying for two years at Kaplan College in Kearny Mesa, she received her registered nursing license. She took a job as a charge nurse caring for elderly residents of Magnolia Post Acute Care in El Cajon for about six months. Then she worked at Kindred Hospital, a long-term acute care hospital in North Park, for about a year.
After having her first child while she was in nursing school and her second child while working at Magnolia Post Acute Care, she delivered her third child at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla just a few days before interviewing for a job at Scripps Mercy.
Mallon worked as a step-down nurse, so-called because the position is considered a step down from working on the ICU floor, from August 2017 to August 2018. Then she began a 12-week training program to become an ICU nurse in December 2018. She said she likes working as an ICU nurse because it requires a higher skill set than a floor nurse.
“I wanted to take care of more critically ill patients,” she said. “You have more autonomy and you use more critical thinking skills.”
Before COVID spread to the United States early this year, Mallon worked in the medical intensive care unit, caring for a variety of patients whose illnesses included the flu, acute respiratory distress, septic patients and heart patients who experienced cardiogenic shock.
After work, she and her husband Torey have their hands full caring for a 3-year-old girl, 4-year-old son and another 7-year-old son who is autistic.
“I have no time for hobbies,” Mallon said. “I literally come home, do therapy for my son, do Google meets and even help my children with summer school. I want the schools to open up, especially for the special needs students.”
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