‘It’s not just the flu’: student documentary spotlights ICU nurse

Senior Claire Imler created a short film documenting the daily life of Deanna Okajima, a nurse in the COVID-19 intensive care unit of Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. Photo courtesy of Imler

Civilians across the country rallied in support of healthcare workers after the initial lockdown prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Whether it was New York’s nightly salute, food donations or discounts from major corporations, displays of appreciation for medical professionals were plentiful. However, as the months crawled by, expressions of gratitude for frontline workers faded. 

In an upcoming documentary short film, Claire Imler, a senior film production major at Chapman University, hopes to offset that apathy. Imler plans to release the film on Vimeo on the weekend of March 13. 

“That was the weekend everything shut down in 2020, and it was just chaos,” Imler said. “I feel like it’d be an interesting thing to release a year later, because the film is focusing on resiliency, everything nurses have had to change in the hospitals to adapt to this and what they’ve discovered over the year.”

The film is centered around Deanna Okajima, a nurse in the COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. Okajima works the night shift in the ICU, spending 12 hours a night administering care to patients who have fallen ill with COVID-19.

“In that period of time, we have patients that go downhill really fast, and then some of them just stay the same, but very few improve,” Okajima told The Panther. “COVID-19 has changed our workflow a lot. We learned to become more efficient and show that we care, because we wear all of this protective gear that makes the communication barrier between the nurse and the patient even more thick.”

Okajima said she hopes the film will provide a window into the experiences of healthcare workers, like her own, amidst the pandemic.

“A lot of times it’s easy for us to remove ourselves from the situation when we don’t have a family member or a friend who is suffering from the pandemic,” Okajima said. “But at the bedside of the patient, you’re seeing another person — just like you or me — suffering before your eyes.”

Imler, who conceptualized, directed, filmed and edited the project herself, aimed to emphasize that emotional magnitude of COVID-19 through the film.

“I hope it’s a reminder that it’s real; it’s not just the flu,” Imler said. “The first two weeks (of the pandemic’s spread), the streets were empty, but now things are happening everywhere. It’s easy to be detached from it, so using film as a way to get people to humanize things that they aren’t impacted by directly is something I want to keep doing.”

Imler told The Panther that the experience of filming in Sharp Memorial’s COVID-19 ICU opened her eyes to the struggles that healthcare workers have been forced to adapt to over the past year.

“What surprised me most was everything they’ve had to change to make (systems of patient care) work for COVID-19,” Imler said. “The main purpose of all of these changes is so that they limit the time they spend in the patients’ rooms. For example, usually patients have heart monitors by their beds, but now they have binoculars for the nurses so they can read those numbers from the windows.” 

Okajima said these COVID-19-induced alterations didn’t only affect the way patient care is administered, but also significantly impacts everyone who works in hospitals.

“There’s so many people who have to work together to make our job work,” Okajima said. “It’s not just the nurses, it’s the support staff, too. COVID-19 has made everyone rise to another level.”