As a Hornets cheerleader, she’s been sidelined. As a nurse, she’s most definitely not.
Olivia Williams and several other members of the Charlotte Hornets’ dance team known as The Honey Bees were taking a break on the sidelines, waiting to rotate back into an intense practice session back on March 11, when all of their phones suddenly piped up with a familiar melody.
It was the iconic theme of ESPN’s “SportsCenter” — “DaaDaDa, DaaDaDa” — and it was a notification bearing a headline that made their hearts sink: “NBA suspends season until further notice after player tests positive for the coronavirus.”
“The tears just started flowing,” says Williams, a 28-year-old Shelby native. “I felt really bad for the rookies, because they didn’t get a true, real rookie season. The season was just about to pick up. We were about to have all these big games that we were about to play. ... I also feel bad for the girls that aren’t returning next year ... what a way to end things.
“But we finished practice. Our coach was like, ‘Just in case.’ ... Then we just sat and talked for awhile. It was really sad. Finally we all were like, ‘Well, we gotta go home now. We do have to work tomorrow.’”
For Williams, dancing with the Honey Bees had been her reliable escape from work. Her stress-reliever.
So it was going to be tough extracurricular activity to lose because her day job — as an operating room nurse at Atrium Health Mercy hospital on the edge of the Elizabeth neighborhood — was about to get a lot more stressful. For the same reason the NBA was going dark.
Williams, the only nurse on the dance team for the 2019-20 season, has been juggling a medical profession and a side hustle as a dancer since graduating with a degree in health and exercise science from Wake Forest University seven years ago.
She was a Carolina Panthers TopCats cheerleader in 2013-14 and a Charlotte Checkers CheckMate from 2014 to 2016 while working as a certified nursing assistant; then she took two years off from dancing while earning her bachelor of science in nursing degree from UNC-Chapel Hill from 2016-18. Williams earned a spot on the Honey Bees in June 2018, and was hired on at Mercy in March 2019.
On a recent video call, she gave us a glimpse of what it’s been like to work at a hospital during these times, opened up about her struggle with living for nearly two months now without real human contact beyond her co-workers, and the creativity she’s shown in trying to stay in shape despite no access to workout equipment.
While in nursing school, she didn’t dance at all. When she came back to it — in spring 2018 — she was a little rusty. “Honestly, dancing at first was kind of hard because I hadn’t danced in two years. That term, you know, ‘If you don’t use it, you lose it,’ that really came into play. Even simple things, like catching on to choreography; I was like, ‘OK, what’s going on? It doesn’t usually take me this long to catch on.’ So that was challenging. But definitely being a nurse was more challenging, because I have somebody’s life in my hand.”
When the Hornets were in season, her sleep schedule wasn’t necessarily what you would call ideal. “On practice days I’d work till 7 p.m. — or I’d leave a little bit early, if possible — and go straight to practice. And normally we wouldn’t get out of practice till 10. Sometimes after. Then I’d have to get up at 4:45, 5 a.m. the next day. I was like, ‘Wow, can I do this?’ It takes you a good year to get comfortable with any type of nursing, and it was pretty stressful in the beginning. I was a new Honeybee, and a new nurse. That was a lot. But game days and practices turned out to be a good break from work.”
Even before the fateful cellphone notification on March 11, Williams had a feeling things were going to get bad. “Just because I worked at the hospital, I feel like I kind of had a one-up on getting information. (The hospital was) talking to us about our schedules changing way before the NBA or other organized sports shut down. So I had an inkling, but I just didn’t want to believe it at first. I’m just like, ‘No! We haven’t even gotten to the really fun part of the season yet!’ ... But yeah, I saw it coming.”
The week after the NBA season was suspended, her job started changing. “They told us, ‘No more set schedules.’ And at first we had Team A and Team B — that was their way of trying to prevent cross-contamination, so the same people worked on the same days in the OR. For awhile, we were working every other day. But then they canceled elective surgeries, so (we were overstaffed). That’s when we basically were told we could get redeployed at any time. So the OR nurses had to train with the floor nurses to revamp their skills. I felt like I was in nursing school again. And floor nursing is so different. (The patients on the floor) can feel what’s going on. You have to talk them through it, and tell them what to expect. You don’t have to do that much in the OR, because they’re asleep.”
The pandemic didn’t really get real for her, though, until... “One day I was redeployed to a COVID unit to help pass out scrubs — like our OR scrubs, the ones they were wearing in this unit had to be washed at a certain temperature that our at-home washers can’t reach. And I remember a patient coming from the ER, and they were hooked to all these lines and this vent, and they were with a respiratory therapist who had all their PPE on. Seeing that, and just seeing how sick (the person was), seeing them in that stretcher passing by us ... that’s the first time I had seen something like that not on TV, or not happening in another state. So that was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s here. It’s here.’”
.jpeg "image2 (3).jpeg")
When Mecklenburg County announced its stay-at-home order in March, she braced for a long, hard road — alone. “That was really scary, because I’m used to being around a lot of people all the time, and living alone and working where I work, I knew that was completely gonna change. So it did get kind of hard, like, ‘Wow, I’m gonna be really by myself for maybe a few months.’ ... I don’t even have my dog. My mom has my dog, because my schedule got crazy. I couldn’t stand the fact that he’d be alone for maybe 16 hours a day. So it’s just me.”
So how is she combating boredom when she’s not at work? “I clean, I reorganize, I sit outside on my balcony. I’m not that much of a TV watcher. I’ve kind of turned into a nerd and I read about work, which is weird — I read a lot of OR journals and about surgeries and stuff. ... I also go to bed so much earlier now, too, because it’s like, what else do I have to do?
As far as staying in shape for if and when the Honey Bees return to action in 2020... “Working out has been very challenging, because I own no type of home-workout stuff at all. So I’ve had to get very creative by, like, saving 2-liter bottles and filling them back up with water, or filling my book bag up with old nursing-school books. Because I really like to lift weights. ... My apartment is a one-bedroom, so it’s small, and I have to think about the people under me. I can’t do too much jumping; I don’t want to make them mad. But thankfully I do have a balcony. So I’ll just work out and do what I can on the balcony.”
.jpeg "image0 (5).jpeg")
Her Honey Bee teammates have gone from cheering for the Hornets to cheering for Williams. “They sent me a really big care package. They all kept asking me, ‘Liv, what do you need?’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean what do I need? I need people! I need for this to be over.’ But they sent me this big box, and it had food, it had gift cards for Instacart so I wouldn’t have to go out to the grocery store, it had all these skin-care products, which was great because the mask was really tearing my skin up. Honestly, though, just in general, somebody from my team or the Hornets organization has emailed me or texted me every day since this started. Even little things like that mean so much. Because (in my situation) I feel like I’m so alone sometimes.”
But seeing what’s going on with some of her co-workers has helped her keep things in perspective. “Most of our surgeons quarantine themselves from their families, by staying in a hotel or somebody else’s apartment. And another reality check for me was when I saw a video that was posted of one of our surgeons. He stopped by his house and his daughters were standing inside the screen door or the glass door. They’re like, ‘Dad, we just want a hug! We just want a hug!’ He put his hand up to the door and he started crying, because he couldn’t give his daughters a hug. Then they started crying, because they didn’t understand why. I was just like, Wow. ... Then another thing, this nurse I work with, she came in crying one day and I was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘I just miss my kids. I haven’t seen my kids physically and held them in over a month,’ because their safety’s more important. That seriously made me think, you know, maybe being alone is better. I mean, I can’t imagine, if I had kids, not being able to see them when I wanted to see them. Or hug them. That made me realize OK, being alone’s not the worst thing.”
And she’s hoping she’ll be able to return to being a social butterfly sooner rather than later. “I’ve found a peace about all this, I would say. I still have my good days and my bad days, but lately, definitely more good days. I feel like there’s a semi-light, at least, at the end of the tunnel, just because right now at work, our schedules just changed again. We’re back to having set days that we work. So that’s a sign — of a little bit more normalcy trying to come back.”
Théoden Janes: 704-358-5897, @theodenjanes
This story was originally published May 13, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
