Mahala Kiss has only been nursing for about a year and a half and most of that time has been in the COVID unit at Royal University Hospital.
“I was just starting to get comfortable with nursing and then the whole pandemic hit so it was a lot and it has been a really long year,” Kiss told ROCK 102’s McGuire.
Recently she was one of the hundreds of health-care workers in the province to receive the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.
According to the provincial government, 2,942 doses of the vaccine had been given to health-care workers in Regina and Saskatoon as of Tuesday.
The workers in Regina received their vaccinations as part of a pilot project connected to the provincial government’s rollout of the vaccine. Vaccinations for the Saskatoon health-care workers are part of Phase 1 of that plan.
On Dec. 21, 3,900 doses of the Pfizer vaccine arrived in Saskatoon, with an additional 975 doses arriving this week. So far, 1,108 doses have been administered in the city to frontline health-care workers.
“I work on the COVID unit at RUH so it has been a lot of work and you see a lot of really sick patients, so it’s really exciting to get the COVID vaccine,” said Kiss.
She said she wants to send out a positive message that the vaccine is here and she said she is not feeling any side effects after getting the shot.
She said getting the vaccine felt like a weight was lifted off her shoulders, and she hopes others will get the shot once it becomes more widely available.
“I have so much hope that people will go out there and get the vaccine, “Kiss said. “I really hope people aren’t scared of it from all the social media where there’s so much false information out there.”