Great song. Great lyrics. Really top notch production. You guys get a great sound going. Very sweet sounding. Kudos for another great effort, to the lot of you. You yourself have a fine talent for making very sweet melodies. This is a lot like the better Tom Petty tunes, but I like the twang for it better. I mean, every single song I hear, I love. Thank you for doing this. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: In this video nurse Vonnie Allen gives testimony under oath before the Canadian National Citizens Inquiry, a national, independent, citizen-led inquiry into Canada's response to covid-19. https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca
TRANSCRIPT -TWO EXCERPTS
0:12
VONNIE ALLEN: My name is Vonnie Allen. I was born and raised in Amherst, Nova Scotia. I left Amherst and moved to Moncton in New Brunswick only long enough to get my RN diploma and begin my nursing career. In April of 1987 I moved back to Amherst with my then husband and began working at Highland View Regional Hospital. In February of 88, upon returning from my two and a half month maternity leave, I was given casual employment on the maternity unit. Little did I know that maternity is where I was meant to be and that I would develop a passion for it that would last Almost 34 years until I was unceremoniously put on unpaid leave on December the 1st 2021 for standing up for my rights and declining to take an experimental medication.
[clapping]
I am the proud mother of four adult children and the blessed nanny of three little boys. Only one of my children has been awake and supportive of me throughout this three-year ordeal. Unfortunately the oldest three have believed the mainstream media and the government and have been made unreasonably fearful like so many others. Two of them have forbidden me to speak of anything related to covid and the mandates. I have been muzzled and disallowed to talk of the impacts that the covid mandates have had on my life, the loss of my career, the loss of my income, the loss of respect from much of my community, the refusal of EI to give back any of what I paid in for over 35 years, the seven months I lived with no income except what I could borrow from friends and family and an RRSP* I was forced to cash in, the inability to step foot in my local bowling alley for five months, a place I called my second home for over 40 years, and the denial of entrance to my own local hospital when my youngest daughter had a grand mal seizure last year and had to be rushed in by ambulance. She didn't know her own name, she couldn't speak, she was totally incapable of advocating for herself, she was terrified and I, her mother, a formerly respected veteran nurse of that very hospital, a hero just two years earlier, was not allowed past the front door because I was not vaccinated with an unproven experimental drug.
I was married to my children's father for 29 years, spent 36 and a half years with him total. He was emotionally abusive, an angry man and he worked when he felt like it. So for all the two years of our marriage I was the major breadwinner. For two years he worked up north in Baker Lake Nunavut and made great money, but then he quit and felt that because he had missed so much while he'd spent many months away, he was entitled to a year off, so the bills piled up. I tell you this because for my entire marriage I lived paycheck to paycheck, robbing Peter to pay Paul, which credit card should I put money toward this pay. When I left him in 2016 I took on all of our accumulated debt 55,000 dollars in return for him not demanding spousal support. I got a consumer proposal and I paid off our debt as well as my vehicle. Times were still tough for me for a few years, but then they were both paid off and for the first time in my life I had money. I could buy groceries without worrying, I could give money to my kids when they needed it, I could give them each two or three hundred dollars at Christmas time to help them out, I could go on vacation or rent a cottage in the summer and I could actually save money. Life was good.
Fast forward to 2021. I started to hear grumblings that I might lose my job if I didn't comply with the vaccine mandate. My unit was so short-staffed that overtime was readily available, so I started picking up overtime shifts in an effort to build a nest egg just in case I should lose my job. But I didn't really believe that was going to happen. Surely to goodness during the worst nursing shortage in history someone would come to their senses and the most senior, most knowledgeable, most experienced nurse in the obstetrical department would not be put off work. But that is exactly what happened.
I went to work on December the 1st and was told by director of Health Services Lisa Lynch that I had to leave. And being denied E.I., my little nest egg didn't last long. My employer told E.I. that I left voluntarily with no just cause. It didn't seem too voluntary to me. In March of 2022 I was forced to put in for retirement and I'd had no intention of retiring in the immediate future. I loved my job. I didn't receive a check until June. Fortunately for me they backdated my retirement to December the 1st. Unfortunately my ex-husband got 45 percent of my pension, so once again after paying back all the people I owed, I was soon back to living paycheck to paycheck. And through no fault of my own. I had done nothing wrong. In 35 years I had never been disciplined or reprimanded, I had only stood up for my rights and not in a hateful malicious way, I had simply declined to put into my body what I felt was not a safe or necessary chemical. And anyone who really knows me knows that I have avoided chemicals as much as possible for many years. So this wasn't a new radical stance for me, it was totally in keeping with my natural lifestyle.
I was devastated to lose my job. I loved nursing. My dad used to tell me that when I was a little girl I always wanted to be a nurse and a mother, so I was a happy woman. Caring for obstetrical patients in labor and delivery, teaching breastfeeding to countless women, caring for them postpartum was my passion. And I was damned good at it. Just ask the women of Cumberland County and surrounding areas who have delivered a child in Amherst since February of 1988 and they will confirm that. To this day I meet women of all ages in all settings who tell me that I was there when they had their child and that they have never forgotten me. Obstetrical nurses have a huge impact on women's lives as well as their family's lives, and I was very fortunate because our unit looked after off-service patients and pediatric patients as well.
Heart attack patients from ICU awaiting cardiac catheterizations, surgical patients medical patients, gynecological patients, palliative patients, we got them all and I was always thankful for that because it kept me learning and enabled me to keep my hand in all aspects of nursing to some degree. And it allowed me the privilege of caring for men and women of all ages.
So nursing was my passion and though I had done nothing wrong I was no longer allowed to do it. And that brings me to my co-workers, how I loved my co-workers and I can safely say that the majority of them loved me and they depended on me. They looked to me to answer their questions and show them how to do things. They came to me to start IVs because I was the expert. They came to me for my advice because I was the only one on my unit with 35 years of knowledge and experience. I hadn't seen it all but I had seen and been involved in most of it.
Labor and delivery nursing involves looking after two patients, and one of them can't be seen. It's an art, a talent, a gut feeling, a skill. And it's not a skill that one develops overnight it requires knowledge but it also requires experience you can read about all the obstetrical emergencies in a book and take a course and ace the exam but nothing can replace living through those emergencies firsthand and learning how to deal with them to come out on the other side with a live mother and a live baby who are both fully functional. And sometimes regardless of what you do, you lose a baby. I have experienced that firsthand with my first pregnancy culminating in a stillbirth, so I was always drawn to those mothers who suffered a similar loss. I felt I had something to share with them, and Lord knows that no one else was jumping up and down to look after them.
In my almost 34 years in obstetrics I had dealt with most obstetrical emergencies both as a patient and as a nurse, so I was not just a valued and loved co-worker, I was their mentor, their only mentor. The next person in line to me had about five years experience. One co-worker had worked In Obstetrics with me many years before but had actually left nursing all together for several years so upon returning she had forgotten a lot of what she had known and had also lost her confidence. And confidence is important, knowing what you know, not being cocky but confident. It is knowledge and confidence that allows you to stand up, to stand up for your patience and be their advocate, to stand up to the doctors when you don't agree with their approach or treatment, to stand up for yourself and your co-workers when management is putting you and them into unsafe working situations. And I did that for my patients and my co-workers, I stood up for them. And I stood up for myself which is why I don't have a career anymore.
QUESTIONER: My understanding from speaking with you earlier was that, in the context of this short staffing, from March to September your obstetrics unit was actually closed, sorry, from March to September 2020, is that right?
VONNIE ALLEN: Yes.
QUESTIONER: Your obstetrics unit was closed.
VONNIE ALLEN: Yeah.
QUESTIONER: What was the reason to the best of your knowledge for that closure?
VONNIE ALLEN: We were closed from March 27th to September of 2020. We were told it was because we were already so short staffed that if any of us got covid the unit would end up shutting down anyway, so we were rerouted to other areas in the hospital, most often medical, but sometimes surgical or ICU or emerge. And during those five months bed occupancy was down drastically.
There were no covid cases in the hospital. There were very few patients in the hospital. Medical had 38 to 39 beds and they might have 20 beds occupied. The ER generally had very few patients during a shift, often the nurses were sitting around behind the desk chatting because they had no patients.
And the majority of patients on medical were patients with dementia awaiting placement. And I have to speak on their behalf. Here we were in our black and white uniforms with masks on. They were already confused, they could never get familiar with anyone because we all look generally the same. The mask muffled our voices and hid our facial expressions and kept them from reading our lips when most of them had some degree of deafness. I would often stand across the room from them, pull my mask down so that they could see that I was a human being and talk to them in a raised voice so they could read my lips.
[clapping]
It was a horrible way to treat people. They weren't permitted any visitors and they knew none of us. I saw some amazing nurses go out of their way to try to enable these patients to FaceTime with their families or talk with them on the phone, but most of the patients struggled to understand what was going on. Many of them died before they were ever placed in long-term care because the rules for getting into long-term term care were ridiculous during covid. If they became palliative, then they were permitted a family member, or sometimes two, but never at the same time. Imagine, it could be do people who live together at home but they weren't allowed to visit their dying mother at the same time. Often by the time they were palliative they no longer recognized their own family members because they hadn't seen them for so long. The masks and the rules were a travesty to health care and particularly to this segment of our society. And during all that time we did plenty of testing but we never had one case of covid.
QUESTIONER: Given the, in the context of the government messaging about how unsafe an unvaccinated nurse would be to their patients, did you ever alert any of your patients to your status?
VONNIE ALLEN: Every one of them.
QUESTIONER: What did you, how did you do that? Tell us about that.
VONNIE ALLEN: I would just bring it up in conversation. I was led to believe by the occasional person, not many, my my nursing co-workers were very supportive of me unlike a lot of people that I hear of, but on occasion I would hear grumblings that that patients didn't want to be looked after by nurses who weren't vaccinated so I made a point of telling them all that I had not been vaccinated against covid.
QUESTIONER: Did you have —
[Applause]
VONNIE ALLEN: I never once had a single patient respond in a negative way, I never had one of them ever ask to have another nurse. Now in at times that would have been difficult because I would have been the only RN, but there was never a patient that ever made me feel uncomfortable or like they felt like they were being looked after somebody who had the plague.
QUESTIONER: Those are uh all of my questions, I'll defer to the panel for any questions.
PANELIST: I have a couple of short questions. Were you the only one in in in your health community that was affected like this or let go?
VONNIE ALLEN: In my hospital I was the only RN. There were two LPNs on the medical floor who didn't take the vaccine, and so lost their jobs. I have no way of knowing how many other people in my hospital in other departments, or how many other people in say, nursing homes in the community, didn't take the shot.
FEMALE VOICE IN AUDIENCE, OFF CAMERA: [inaudible]
VONNIE ALLEN: Who's that?
FEMALE VOICE IN AUDIENCE, OFF CAMERA: [inaudible]
VONNIE ALLEN: Yes!
[Applause]
PANELIST: You also said that the unit was closed down between March and December of—
VONNIE ALLEN: March and September
PANELIST: September through 2020 and the reason given was that if they lost one nurse they couldn't operate.
VONNIE ALLEN: Yeah.
PANELIST: So my question is, when they lost you how did they operate?
VONNIE ALLEN: Well I can tell you, they're not a happy bunch. They were terrified when they started thinking that they might lose me. We would have staff meetings and one of the girls would say why aren't we going to talk about the elephant in the room here? Like, what are we going to do if Vonnie has to leave? What are we going to do about this? And our unit manager would respond by saying, well, you know, that's not really something that I have any information about, I can't really talk about that. And nobody was giving us any answers and we just kept hoping, beyond hope that it wouldn't happen. We had just started a new rotation recently and we were having a difficult time filling the spaces in that rotation. As I said, overtime was readily available, so they were wondering, what are we going to do when we lose you too? You know, and not just another staff member but the one with the most knowledge of anybody there, you know?
One of my co-workers messaged me last week and I actually sent the message to Gail. She said Vonnie, I'm still grieving the loss of you from our unit. She said, it's never been the same since you left. I feel like it was the beginning of the end for us. She said, it's not a good place to work anymore. It's not safe, and you know, she said, it's you know, it's just not right, you know. We're missing you badly.
PANELIST: Did you receive any comments support or anything from the rest of the staff, the doctors, you you talked about the LPNs, you talked about the nurses, I didn't hear you say the the doctor word?
VONNIE ALLEN: Well it's interesting. One of our obstetricians, I had a great deal of respect for her, she had a little, a few more years experience in obstetrics than I did, and she and I often disagreed on a lot of points, but we respected each other enough to agree to disagree. But when it started getting down to the end, and I knew I was going to lose my job, she would approach me and say, Vonnie what are you going to do? Like, why don't you take the vaccine? And I'd say, no, I'm not taking the vaccine, I'm not sure what I'm going to do but I'm not taking the vaccine. And, well, what are you, aren't you worried? Well yeah I'm worried, you know. And then she sent me a message one day on messenger and said, I've been hearing that you might not be able to get your pension, they might just pay it out in one one lump sum, like I'm really worried about you. And I said— and she said, aren't you worried? And I responded and said, yeah I am worried but doesn't that seem a little bit Nazi to you? Take this experimental drug that has no proven effectiveness and no safety record or, you're going to lose your job and you might lose your pension, too? And she responded back by saying no, that doesn't sound Nazi to me, no one's leading you to the death camp, no one's taken you to the gas chambers. And and then she went on this big tangent about how important it was to take it, nobody said it was a hundred percent effective but you need to take it to protect all those vulnerable people in society. That's the last time I ever messaged with her.
PANELIST: Thank you.
VONNIE ALLEN: And as far as the other doctors on the unit, they didn't really have much to say. One of them is my family doctor, and I've always admired him, but none of them stood up for me basically. We had one doctor in the entire hospital who spoke out very, very candidly about the vaccines, about the lockdowns, the mandates, the masks. I don't know how he's still practicing. His Facebook page is covered on a daily basis with this stuff, and I'm thinking, how is he getting away with it? You know? He's still a doctor! He's the only one, the only one who spoke out against it.
There's there's one other thing I'd like to point out. When I left, I took with me a lot of knowledge and experience and one of the areas that I can assure you is really suffering right now is breastfeeding. I never took the lactation consultant course, I started it when my children were very little but I soon realized that my kids would only be little for so long and it took up far too much time. One of my co-workers, a friend and a co-worker for 28 years, she took the course. She went off sick in 2016 with cancer and never came back to work and ultimately died in 2020. But even during her years at work she was team lead so she spent much of her time at meetings and rarely had direct patient contact, so I became known as the breastfeeding guru. I had breastfed my own four children and taken numerous courses over the years, and I had helped literally hundreds if not thousands of women breastfeed. As with maternity in general I had a passion for it. The girls often called me the boob whisperer. They said if Vonnie can't latch that baby no one can.
I spent a lot of time teaching women to breastfeed and latching their babies. And some babies won't latch, so I came up with plans to get their babies fed until we could latch them. I taught hand expression and pumping to moms as well as my co-workers. I hand expressed more women's breasts for colostrum than you could ever imagine because it's something that women don't come naturally, they don't know how to do that naturally. I latched babies to moms who couldn't keep their eyes open and held the babies there while their mother slept. I spent countless hours with both inpatients and outpatients trying to resolve breastfeeding issues, latching problems, lack of supply problems, sore nipples, blocked ducts, oversupply problems, you name it.
I was the solution finder. I had two colleagues, two of my LPN co-workers who also had a passion for breastfeeding, and I was always so pleased if one of them was coming on after I'd spent my shift with a difficult breastfeeder. I knew that they would work just as hard as I had to try to help that woman have success, but they would usually come to me to confirm that what they were doing was right. We would discuss different tactics and ideas and brainstorm with each other, but I was the one with all of the years of knowledge and by far the most hands-on experience, so when I left that was gone. You know?
Like, the fact that they could just do this to us, and you know, like, this is supposed to be about our health, all of these mandates. But none of it has been good for anybody's health.
[clapping]
If you have no more questions I have one final thing to say. Once upon a time I was a respected member of my community. I was a respected aunt, mother, sister-in-law and friend. Because of the stance I took, because I declined to take an experimental drug with no science to back it, I lost my job and my credibility. I have lost the respect of my oldest children, a niece, many of my friends, my sister-in-law has blocked me, I have been discriminated against and denied entrance to restaurants, theaters, my bowling alley, my friend's party. I was unable to go away on vacation with my four oldest girlfriends of over 40 years. I spent 35 years in a profession where I helped and cared for other people but now I am not allowed to speak because my opinion no longer matters. I have been censored.
Great song. Great lyrics. Really top notch production. You guys get a great sound going. Very sweet sounding. Kudos for another great effort, to the lot of you. You yourself have a fine talent for making very sweet melodies. This is a lot like the better Tom Petty tunes, but I like the twang for it better. I mean, every single song I hear, I love. Thank you for doing this. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Thank you so much. A lot of the credit must also go to the musicians who put the songs together. All from fiverr.
When do we rise up and sweep these criminals from office?
Song is well done, but what they did to her and her community is atrocious.
Vonnie Allen RN Testimony at NCI (March 16, 2023 - Truro, Nova Scotia)
March 16, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6UZ2-k3E8M&t=26s
source: https://www.youtube.com/@citizensinquiry/videos
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: In this video nurse Vonnie Allen gives testimony under oath before the Canadian National Citizens Inquiry, a national, independent, citizen-led inquiry into Canada's response to covid-19. https://nationalcitizensinquiry.ca
TRANSCRIPT -TWO EXCERPTS
0:12
VONNIE ALLEN: My name is Vonnie Allen. I was born and raised in Amherst, Nova Scotia. I left Amherst and moved to Moncton in New Brunswick only long enough to get my RN diploma and begin my nursing career. In April of 1987 I moved back to Amherst with my then husband and began working at Highland View Regional Hospital. In February of 88, upon returning from my two and a half month maternity leave, I was given casual employment on the maternity unit. Little did I know that maternity is where I was meant to be and that I would develop a passion for it that would last Almost 34 years until I was unceremoniously put on unpaid leave on December the 1st 2021 for standing up for my rights and declining to take an experimental medication.
[clapping]
I am the proud mother of four adult children and the blessed nanny of three little boys. Only one of my children has been awake and supportive of me throughout this three-year ordeal. Unfortunately the oldest three have believed the mainstream media and the government and have been made unreasonably fearful like so many others. Two of them have forbidden me to speak of anything related to covid and the mandates. I have been muzzled and disallowed to talk of the impacts that the covid mandates have had on my life, the loss of my career, the loss of my income, the loss of respect from much of my community, the refusal of EI to give back any of what I paid in for over 35 years, the seven months I lived with no income except what I could borrow from friends and family and an RRSP* I was forced to cash in, the inability to step foot in my local bowling alley for five months, a place I called my second home for over 40 years, and the denial of entrance to my own local hospital when my youngest daughter had a grand mal seizure last year and had to be rushed in by ambulance. She didn't know her own name, she couldn't speak, she was totally incapable of advocating for herself, she was terrified and I, her mother, a formerly respected veteran nurse of that very hospital, a hero just two years earlier, was not allowed past the front door because I was not vaccinated with an unproven experimental drug.
I was married to my children's father for 29 years, spent 36 and a half years with him total. He was emotionally abusive, an angry man and he worked when he felt like it. So for all the two years of our marriage I was the major breadwinner. For two years he worked up north in Baker Lake Nunavut and made great money, but then he quit and felt that because he had missed so much while he'd spent many months away, he was entitled to a year off, so the bills piled up. I tell you this because for my entire marriage I lived paycheck to paycheck, robbing Peter to pay Paul, which credit card should I put money toward this pay. When I left him in 2016 I took on all of our accumulated debt 55,000 dollars in return for him not demanding spousal support. I got a consumer proposal and I paid off our debt as well as my vehicle. Times were still tough for me for a few years, but then they were both paid off and for the first time in my life I had money. I could buy groceries without worrying, I could give money to my kids when they needed it, I could give them each two or three hundred dollars at Christmas time to help them out, I could go on vacation or rent a cottage in the summer and I could actually save money. Life was good.
Fast forward to 2021. I started to hear grumblings that I might lose my job if I didn't comply with the vaccine mandate. My unit was so short-staffed that overtime was readily available, so I started picking up overtime shifts in an effort to build a nest egg just in case I should lose my job. But I didn't really believe that was going to happen. Surely to goodness during the worst nursing shortage in history someone would come to their senses and the most senior, most knowledgeable, most experienced nurse in the obstetrical department would not be put off work. But that is exactly what happened.
I went to work on December the 1st and was told by director of Health Services Lisa Lynch that I had to leave. And being denied E.I., my little nest egg didn't last long. My employer told E.I. that I left voluntarily with no just cause. It didn't seem too voluntary to me. In March of 2022 I was forced to put in for retirement and I'd had no intention of retiring in the immediate future. I loved my job. I didn't receive a check until June. Fortunately for me they backdated my retirement to December the 1st. Unfortunately my ex-husband got 45 percent of my pension, so once again after paying back all the people I owed, I was soon back to living paycheck to paycheck. And through no fault of my own. I had done nothing wrong. In 35 years I had never been disciplined or reprimanded, I had only stood up for my rights and not in a hateful malicious way, I had simply declined to put into my body what I felt was not a safe or necessary chemical. And anyone who really knows me knows that I have avoided chemicals as much as possible for many years. So this wasn't a new radical stance for me, it was totally in keeping with my natural lifestyle.
I was devastated to lose my job. I loved nursing. My dad used to tell me that when I was a little girl I always wanted to be a nurse and a mother, so I was a happy woman. Caring for obstetrical patients in labor and delivery, teaching breastfeeding to countless women, caring for them postpartum was my passion. And I was damned good at it. Just ask the women of Cumberland County and surrounding areas who have delivered a child in Amherst since February of 1988 and they will confirm that. To this day I meet women of all ages in all settings who tell me that I was there when they had their child and that they have never forgotten me. Obstetrical nurses have a huge impact on women's lives as well as their family's lives, and I was very fortunate because our unit looked after off-service patients and pediatric patients as well.
Heart attack patients from ICU awaiting cardiac catheterizations, surgical patients medical patients, gynecological patients, palliative patients, we got them all and I was always thankful for that because it kept me learning and enabled me to keep my hand in all aspects of nursing to some degree. And it allowed me the privilege of caring for men and women of all ages.
So nursing was my passion and though I had done nothing wrong I was no longer allowed to do it. And that brings me to my co-workers, how I loved my co-workers and I can safely say that the majority of them loved me and they depended on me. They looked to me to answer their questions and show them how to do things. They came to me to start IVs because I was the expert. They came to me for my advice because I was the only one on my unit with 35 years of knowledge and experience. I hadn't seen it all but I had seen and been involved in most of it.
Labor and delivery nursing involves looking after two patients, and one of them can't be seen. It's an art, a talent, a gut feeling, a skill. And it's not a skill that one develops overnight it requires knowledge but it also requires experience you can read about all the obstetrical emergencies in a book and take a course and ace the exam but nothing can replace living through those emergencies firsthand and learning how to deal with them to come out on the other side with a live mother and a live baby who are both fully functional. And sometimes regardless of what you do, you lose a baby. I have experienced that firsthand with my first pregnancy culminating in a stillbirth, so I was always drawn to those mothers who suffered a similar loss. I felt I had something to share with them, and Lord knows that no one else was jumping up and down to look after them.
In my almost 34 years in obstetrics I had dealt with most obstetrical emergencies both as a patient and as a nurse, so I was not just a valued and loved co-worker, I was their mentor, their only mentor. The next person in line to me had about five years experience. One co-worker had worked In Obstetrics with me many years before but had actually left nursing all together for several years so upon returning she had forgotten a lot of what she had known and had also lost her confidence. And confidence is important, knowing what you know, not being cocky but confident. It is knowledge and confidence that allows you to stand up, to stand up for your patience and be their advocate, to stand up to the doctors when you don't agree with their approach or treatment, to stand up for yourself and your co-workers when management is putting you and them into unsafe working situations. And I did that for my patients and my co-workers, I stood up for them. And I stood up for myself which is why I don't have a career anymore.
[clapping]
11:20
END OF FIRST EXCERPT
SECOND EXCERPT
14:45
QUESTIONER: My understanding from speaking with you earlier was that, in the context of this short staffing, from March to September your obstetrics unit was actually closed, sorry, from March to September 2020, is that right?
VONNIE ALLEN: Yes.
QUESTIONER: Your obstetrics unit was closed.
VONNIE ALLEN: Yeah.
QUESTIONER: What was the reason to the best of your knowledge for that closure?
VONNIE ALLEN: We were closed from March 27th to September of 2020. We were told it was because we were already so short staffed that if any of us got covid the unit would end up shutting down anyway, so we were rerouted to other areas in the hospital, most often medical, but sometimes surgical or ICU or emerge. And during those five months bed occupancy was down drastically.
There were no covid cases in the hospital. There were very few patients in the hospital. Medical had 38 to 39 beds and they might have 20 beds occupied. The ER generally had very few patients during a shift, often the nurses were sitting around behind the desk chatting because they had no patients.
And the majority of patients on medical were patients with dementia awaiting placement. And I have to speak on their behalf. Here we were in our black and white uniforms with masks on. They were already confused, they could never get familiar with anyone because we all look generally the same. The mask muffled our voices and hid our facial expressions and kept them from reading our lips when most of them had some degree of deafness. I would often stand across the room from them, pull my mask down so that they could see that I was a human being and talk to them in a raised voice so they could read my lips.
[clapping]
It was a horrible way to treat people. They weren't permitted any visitors and they knew none of us. I saw some amazing nurses go out of their way to try to enable these patients to FaceTime with their families or talk with them on the phone, but most of the patients struggled to understand what was going on. Many of them died before they were ever placed in long-term care because the rules for getting into long-term term care were ridiculous during covid. If they became palliative, then they were permitted a family member, or sometimes two, but never at the same time. Imagine, it could be do people who live together at home but they weren't allowed to visit their dying mother at the same time. Often by the time they were palliative they no longer recognized their own family members because they hadn't seen them for so long. The masks and the rules were a travesty to health care and particularly to this segment of our society. And during all that time we did plenty of testing but we never had one case of covid.
QUESTIONER: Given the, in the context of the government messaging about how unsafe an unvaccinated nurse would be to their patients, did you ever alert any of your patients to your status?
VONNIE ALLEN: Every one of them.
QUESTIONER: What did you, how did you do that? Tell us about that.
VONNIE ALLEN: I would just bring it up in conversation. I was led to believe by the occasional person, not many, my my nursing co-workers were very supportive of me unlike a lot of people that I hear of, but on occasion I would hear grumblings that that patients didn't want to be looked after by nurses who weren't vaccinated so I made a point of telling them all that I had not been vaccinated against covid.
QUESTIONER: Did you have —
[Applause]
VONNIE ALLEN: I never once had a single patient respond in a negative way, I never had one of them ever ask to have another nurse. Now in at times that would have been difficult because I would have been the only RN, but there was never a patient that ever made me feel uncomfortable or like they felt like they were being looked after somebody who had the plague.
QUESTIONER: Those are uh all of my questions, I'll defer to the panel for any questions.
PANELIST: I have a couple of short questions. Were you the only one in in in your health community that was affected like this or let go?
VONNIE ALLEN: In my hospital I was the only RN. There were two LPNs on the medical floor who didn't take the vaccine, and so lost their jobs. I have no way of knowing how many other people in my hospital in other departments, or how many other people in say, nursing homes in the community, didn't take the shot.
FEMALE VOICE IN AUDIENCE, OFF CAMERA: [inaudible]
VONNIE ALLEN: Who's that?
FEMALE VOICE IN AUDIENCE, OFF CAMERA: [inaudible]
VONNIE ALLEN: Yes!
[Applause]
PANELIST: You also said that the unit was closed down between March and December of—
VONNIE ALLEN: March and September
PANELIST: September through 2020 and the reason given was that if they lost one nurse they couldn't operate.
VONNIE ALLEN: Yeah.
PANELIST: So my question is, when they lost you how did they operate?
VONNIE ALLEN: Well I can tell you, they're not a happy bunch. They were terrified when they started thinking that they might lose me. We would have staff meetings and one of the girls would say why aren't we going to talk about the elephant in the room here? Like, what are we going to do if Vonnie has to leave? What are we going to do about this? And our unit manager would respond by saying, well, you know, that's not really something that I have any information about, I can't really talk about that. And nobody was giving us any answers and we just kept hoping, beyond hope that it wouldn't happen. We had just started a new rotation recently and we were having a difficult time filling the spaces in that rotation. As I said, overtime was readily available, so they were wondering, what are we going to do when we lose you too? You know, and not just another staff member but the one with the most knowledge of anybody there, you know?
One of my co-workers messaged me last week and I actually sent the message to Gail. She said Vonnie, I'm still grieving the loss of you from our unit. She said, it's never been the same since you left. I feel like it was the beginning of the end for us. She said, it's not a good place to work anymore. It's not safe, and you know, she said, it's you know, it's just not right, you know. We're missing you badly.
PANELIST: Did you receive any comments support or anything from the rest of the staff, the doctors, you you talked about the LPNs, you talked about the nurses, I didn't hear you say the the doctor word?
VONNIE ALLEN: Well it's interesting. One of our obstetricians, I had a great deal of respect for her, she had a little, a few more years experience in obstetrics than I did, and she and I often disagreed on a lot of points, but we respected each other enough to agree to disagree. But when it started getting down to the end, and I knew I was going to lose my job, she would approach me and say, Vonnie what are you going to do? Like, why don't you take the vaccine? And I'd say, no, I'm not taking the vaccine, I'm not sure what I'm going to do but I'm not taking the vaccine. And, well, what are you, aren't you worried? Well yeah I'm worried, you know. And then she sent me a message one day on messenger and said, I've been hearing that you might not be able to get your pension, they might just pay it out in one one lump sum, like I'm really worried about you. And I said— and she said, aren't you worried? And I responded and said, yeah I am worried but doesn't that seem a little bit Nazi to you? Take this experimental drug that has no proven effectiveness and no safety record or, you're going to lose your job and you might lose your pension, too? And she responded back by saying no, that doesn't sound Nazi to me, no one's leading you to the death camp, no one's taken you to the gas chambers. And and then she went on this big tangent about how important it was to take it, nobody said it was a hundred percent effective but you need to take it to protect all those vulnerable people in society. That's the last time I ever messaged with her.
PANELIST: Thank you.
VONNIE ALLEN: And as far as the other doctors on the unit, they didn't really have much to say. One of them is my family doctor, and I've always admired him, but none of them stood up for me basically. We had one doctor in the entire hospital who spoke out very, very candidly about the vaccines, about the lockdowns, the mandates, the masks. I don't know how he's still practicing. His Facebook page is covered on a daily basis with this stuff, and I'm thinking, how is he getting away with it? You know? He's still a doctor! He's the only one, the only one who spoke out against it.
There's there's one other thing I'd like to point out. When I left, I took with me a lot of knowledge and experience and one of the areas that I can assure you is really suffering right now is breastfeeding. I never took the lactation consultant course, I started it when my children were very little but I soon realized that my kids would only be little for so long and it took up far too much time. One of my co-workers, a friend and a co-worker for 28 years, she took the course. She went off sick in 2016 with cancer and never came back to work and ultimately died in 2020. But even during her years at work she was team lead so she spent much of her time at meetings and rarely had direct patient contact, so I became known as the breastfeeding guru. I had breastfed my own four children and taken numerous courses over the years, and I had helped literally hundreds if not thousands of women breastfeed. As with maternity in general I had a passion for it. The girls often called me the boob whisperer. They said if Vonnie can't latch that baby no one can.
I spent a lot of time teaching women to breastfeed and latching their babies. And some babies won't latch, so I came up with plans to get their babies fed until we could latch them. I taught hand expression and pumping to moms as well as my co-workers. I hand expressed more women's breasts for colostrum than you could ever imagine because it's something that women don't come naturally, they don't know how to do that naturally. I latched babies to moms who couldn't keep their eyes open and held the babies there while their mother slept. I spent countless hours with both inpatients and outpatients trying to resolve breastfeeding issues, latching problems, lack of supply problems, sore nipples, blocked ducts, oversupply problems, you name it.
I was the solution finder. I had two colleagues, two of my LPN co-workers who also had a passion for breastfeeding, and I was always so pleased if one of them was coming on after I'd spent my shift with a difficult breastfeeder. I knew that they would work just as hard as I had to try to help that woman have success, but they would usually come to me to confirm that what they were doing was right. We would discuss different tactics and ideas and brainstorm with each other, but I was the one with all of the years of knowledge and by far the most hands-on experience, so when I left that was gone. You know?
Like, the fact that they could just do this to us, and you know, like, this is supposed to be about our health, all of these mandates. But none of it has been good for anybody's health.
[clapping]
If you have no more questions I have one final thing to say. Once upon a time I was a respected member of my community. I was a respected aunt, mother, sister-in-law and friend. Because of the stance I took, because I declined to take an experimental drug with no science to back it, I lost my job and my credibility. I have lost the respect of my oldest children, a niece, many of my friends, my sister-in-law has blocked me, I have been discriminated against and denied entrance to restaurants, theaters, my bowling alley, my friend's party. I was unable to go away on vacation with my four oldest girlfriends of over 40 years. I spent 35 years in a profession where I helped and cared for other people but now I am not allowed to speak because my opinion no longer matters. I have been censored.
30:09
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:
* Registered Retirement Savings Plan
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