COOK- A mix of care, confidence, and relief filled the air late Friday morning at Cook Community Center, as staff members of Cook Hospital expertly and empathetically walked people through the process of getting their first coronavirus vaccine dose.
It was midway through the final day of a three-day, 300-dose community vaccination clinic administered by the hospital, and while outside of the clinic one might expect Chief Operating Officer Julie Lesemann to be focused on those duties, she was in full registered nurse mode as she prepared to inject Daniel Polman, of Aurora, with the vaccine.
“Hopefully it’s worth it,” Polman said. “I’ve been searching here and there and this one popped up. Now, of course, they’re all showing up, the ones I previously saw. But we had this, so we just got it over with. It was a nice drive today anyway.”
Polman moved on to the area where vaccine recipients were asked to wait to see if they had any adverse reactions to the injections. As he had for the first two days, volunteer-retired physician-Cook Mayor Harold Johnston sat nearby, ready to step in if a medical need arose.
“We have people who have actually cried when they got here, they’re so excited to get the vaccine,” Lesemann said. “They’re from all over the area. This is open to everybody.”
Polman wasn’t anywhere close to being in the running if there had been a prize for “patient coming the farthest distance to be vaccinated.” Director of Nursing Nichole Chiabotti described where some of the patients were coming from.
“The majority are from this region, but it’s kind of all over the map,” she said. “We’ve had a couple here from Wisconsin, we’ve had several couples from Duluth, some couples from the cities, and we had a guy from Bemidji.”
They also had someone from McKinley, Kathy Plesha. Like Polman, she had registered elsewhere for an opportunity to get vaccinated.
“I got a call to go to either Rochester or Minneapolis or the DECC in Duluth, and I’m like, ‘I’m not running all over,’” Plesha said. “But I’ve been trying. It’s not the first time.”
Then she got the call from Cook.
“I feel lucky,” she said. “My husband just finished his second one yesterday.”
“People are so excited about this,” said Plesha’s nurse, Annie Dougherty. “It’s been amazing. It’s a great thing for the community. Doing something positive feels great.”
Chiabotti echoed those sentiments.
“Everybody’s been so happy to be here,” she said. “It’s been a lot of work, but everyone is really happy to be a part of it. It’s nice to see everybody so thankful to get the vaccine and it’s just fun, it’s a different kind of nursing that we don’t usually get to do in a hospital or ER setting.”
Chiabotti said that they’re ready to do another community vaccination clinic, but as of Friday she didn’t know when that would be. It all depends on when the state tells them they’re getting another allocation of the vaccine, she said.