When nurse Kamal Ibrahim woke up on Tuesday, he knew the weather would make it difficult to come in for his 2:30 p.m. shift in the rehab unit at Cox Walnut Lawn. As the snow fell in the late morning, he worked on digging out his van so he could drive in from his home on ten acres near Republic.
He was making his way down the driveway when his van got stuck. He called a couple of friends to help him get going again, but they were snowed in as well.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he says. He didn’t have a lot of options, but he did have access to one four-wheel-drive vehicle: his John Deere utility tractor. “I told my wife I was going to drive it. She didn’t want me to try it, but she could see I was determined to come in.”
Ibrahim packed a small bag of supplies, put it into the tractor’s front loader and took off. At roughly 7 mph, Ibrahim headed down U.S. 60 and onto James River Freeway.
The tractor has an open cab, so several layers of clothing were his only protection from icy temperatures and 40 mph winds. Blowing snow made for terrible visibility and Ibrahim found himself on the freeway with semis and other vehicles plowing through the blizzard.
“There were semis and trucks passing me and there was snow flying everywhere. I was a little bit anxious,” he says. “I was dressed very well, the only problem was my eyes. I was worried they might freeze; they were really burning.”
After a 15-mile drive that took more than two hours, Ibrahim made it to work. He arrived five minutes early. He stayed on at the end of his shift and he slept in one of the available rooms before catching a ride home with a co-worker late Wednesday morning.
CoxHealth’s Engineering department is planning to haul Ibrahim’s tractor back to his home in the next few days. Ibrahim says he’s not sure he’d try the trip again — “maybe if it were above 40 degrees”— but on Tuesday he was mainly thinking about the needs of his patients.
“That’s what it’s all about, helping our patients,” he says. “Some nurses couldn’t come in because of the snow, but people still needed care. Our patients deserve good care, so I decided I needed to come in.”
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