Central Texas woman takes break from COVID-19 frontlines to spend Christmas at home

TEMPLE, Texas (KWTX) – Respiratory therapist Julie Sullivan, who has worked on the frontlines of COVID-19 patient care across the country since almost the start of the pandemic, has returned home to spend Christmas with her family.

She says it was time “To be home with my kids and just love on them and just rest emotionally and physically and just get well to go out and fight again,” Sullivan said.

She quit her job here in April and moved from Temple to Brooklyn, N.Y., where COVID-19 cases were surging.

As a respiratory therapist, monitoring COVID patients on ventilators, she called the hospitals there a war zone.

“People ask me about my experiences and it feels good to talk about it.”

After her assignment there was finished, she volunteered again and was sent to two different cities in Virginia.

“To them I was kind of this hero to them because they were like ‘you were in New York?’ And they would just hug me,” Sullivan said.

She signed up for the last assignment counting the days to make sure it would be over by Christmas.

She finished there this week and drove home.

“When I saw the Welcome to Texas” sign my eyes teared up a little, it was beautiful to see those Texas flags waving hello to me,” she said.

But because her assignment there was just ending, she missed her window to be vaccinated at that hospital.

She’s hopeful her next assignment to Fargo, N.D. will have a dose waiting for her when she gets there in January.

Looking back she says she’s amazed with how far the medical field has come in treating the virus.

“They have more medicine and more treatments with the plasma and things like that that we didn’t know and didn’t have and we’re catching it earlier,” she says.

But as long as it’s out there she wants to keep lending a helping hand.

Though the faces of patients she lost are still with her today, and she often thinks about their families, she has hope the vaccine can put an end to the horrible disease she’s seen up close.

“I’ve stayed healthy so I just want to keep helping people fight this and get better.”

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