It’s National Nurse Week. As we celebrate all the nurses working hard right now to keep us safe during the COVID-19 pandemic we hear from Knoxville’s Nichole Nichols. A Registered Nurse who spent 23 days in New York City fighting the disease. Nichols, who worked 12 hour shifts on the front lines with over forty patients, has a message for people who downplay the seriousness of the disease. Nichols says she hopes those people are ok with Facetiming their family while they pass, knowing a stranger in full gear can barely hold their hand. She says she hopes people take it seriously, because she knows we aren’t in New York, but we’re still humans, and it’s still here.

Despite all she has seen and been through, Nichols tells KNIA/KRLS News the reason she continues to do what she does is because it is what she signed up for when she became a nurse, to be a servant. 

Nichols says out of all the heartache one of the best days of her life that will stay with her forever was watching one of her first patients go from near death, to pulling through and being discharged.