It’s been almost one year since Michaela Cortes and her fellow Texas Woman’s University nursing students watched Ebola show up and create concern just down the road in Dallas.
“Just seeing it there, with like, seeing the panic and seeing how the city took over and tried to deal with such a case,” Cortes recalled Thursday.
That was the moment the illness truly became real for many, and the same time Cortes stepped up her studies to fight Ebola.
Over the summer she traveled to Bethesda, Maryland where she spent months as an intern at the National Institutes of Health where she specifically studied the medical response to Ebola.
The Dallas native’s focus, like the focus of many in her field still, was protecting healthcare workers who’d come into contact with infected patients by using protective equipment and response tactics to administer care, while protecting themselves.
Like many facets of the response, Cortes said that is an ever-growing and evolving part.
"We need to prepare our healthcare workers early on so we learn good techniques for when we do have to deal with these," said Cortes.
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When Ebola arrived in the Metroplex last September, it lead to concern among many, as three healthcare workers did get sick trying to help others with the illness. Fortunately, all three in the end survived.
Another patient died during the crisis.
Though many in the public have moved on, Cortes said medical experts and future nurses like herself have to keep studying and improving for when Ebola, or something like it, inevitably hits somewhere again.
Cortes plans to continue studying the illness at TWU’s Dallas campus and eventually will begin her clinicals at Texas Health Presbyterian Dallas, which is the same hospital where the Ebola fight centered last year and where Cortes was born.
