‘A huge honour’: Guelph nurse administers COVID-19 vaccine to her own grandmother

Annika Ferwerda has been fighting COVID-19 from the front lines at Guelph General Hospital. She’s even been infected with the virus herself and unknowingly passed it onto most of her family.

But on Thursday, the registered nurse put all of that behind her when she vaccinated her 91-year-old grandmother at the clinic inside the West End Community Centre.

“This is a huge weight off our shoulders,” Ferwerda said. “It’s a huge honour and I’m so relieved and happy to be part of this.”

Ferwerda describes her grandmother, Anna Riemer, as a ‘tough cookie,’ still driving on her own and attending church every Sunday, albeit virtually during the pandemic.

Riemer was born in The Netherlands and manages to get a taste of home with frequent trips to Dutch Toko, a specialty grocery store providing Dutch goods to Guelphites.

Other than that she’s at home, isolated away from her family and friends.

But the entire family is tight-knit and it shows with their living situation. Ferwerda shares a semi-detached home with her sister and their parents live next door while Riemer has an apartment below the sisters.

That living situation became a bit of a challenge during the pandemic with Ferwerda working at the hospital, including taking shifts treating COVID-19-positive patients.

Despite opportunities to live elsewhere, Riemer was steadfast and did not want to leave her home.

But letting the senior be alone was out of the question, and Ferwerda said the family made sure to see her every day.

“From the very beginning, we were so careful with how we interacted with her,” Ferwerda said.

Before the pandemic hit, the family would have morning coffees together and that was something they weren’t willing to stop due to the virus.

So the family would be outside on the porch with Riemer inside and a glass door dividing them — even during the winter with jackets on, Ferwerda said.

“Her mental health was at the top of our priority list,” she said. “We tried to keep life as normal and in much of a routine as possible.”

The precautions taken by Ferwerda and her family have been stringent to the point that Riemer thought they may have been overreacting early on in the pandemic.

When someone has to go into her apartment to bring groceries or fix something, everyone wears masks and uses hand sanitizer.

“One slip up is all you need to infect somebody,” Ferwerda said.

It’s likely those precautions paid off in December when Ferwerda caught COVID-19 while working a shift at the hospital.

The virus then spread throughout the household to the entire family — everyone except Riemer, who did not become infected.

“I am so thankful we never let up with the precautions we were taking with my grandmother because that would have just ended up being heartbreaking if I gave it to her,” Ferwerda said.

The rest of the family experienced what seemed like a bad cold. Ferwerda said they were lucky.

But the positive tests came as a shock to the nurse who said she did everything to protect her family — wearing PPE at all times during a shift and changing out of her scrubs at work, leaving them inside-out before placing them in a bag which went directly into the washing machine.

“Just shows how sneaky the virus is,” she said.

But now that her grandmother is vaccinated, Ferwerda said she can’t help but think about the experiences she has been through this past year at the hospital.

She maintained that administering the vaccine means more to her than to her grandmother who is receiving it.

“There’s no way for her to know what I’ve seen at the hospital or the family members I have talked to when they can’t come in and see their grandmother,” she said.

“There’s no way for her to understand that.”

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Ferwerda is fully vaccinated, having received two doses during Phase 1 of the province’s rollout for health-care workers.

But even with the vaccinations, the family’s precautions are not being eased.

Still, Ferwerda said she looks forward to when they go back inside and enjoy those morning coffees around a table.

Rather than taking a vacation, getting together with her family is what she looks forward to most.

“There’s still that underlying stress or worry, especially if I’m coming from the hospital, like am I going to get someone else sick. All my fears were brought to life when that happened in December,” she said.

“When we can have a family gathering again and it’ll feel like old times, then I feel like we have made it out the other side.”