DENVER — As NASA moves forward with it’s Artemis Program, which has a goal of developing ways to build a colony on the moon, the Colorado Council of Black Nurses Inc. Aerospace Nursing Department is continuing to research the best ways to provide healthcare to astronauts and others spending time in space.
“If we are going to have a colony on the moon, which is the current, you know, trajectory, part of the Artemis missions, we need actual health care, and that's what nurses do,” Robin Bruce, immediate past president of the Colorado Council of Black Nurses (CCBN) said.
Founded in 1973, the Colorado Council of Black Nurses is a nonprofit that focuses on supporting healthcare workers, providing scholarships for students, educating the community, and now researching how to best provide healthcare in space.
Bruce said part of the blueprint for space nursing already exists.
“We've had aerospace since the 1950s right? And we have nurses that do flight for life, that’s what most people think about, you have the combat nurse that picks up our soldiers from the front lines and brings them back and gives them care,” Bruce said.
Bruce said for providing healthcare on the moon and in space, other methods outside of emergency care need to be considered and developed.
“If we're going to be off Earth orbit and all those little exoplanets in between, we have to know how to sustain that proper care... we'll have interstellar travel. We'll have folks coming back and forth from space to Earth, and as nurses, we're going to have to be able to recognize symptoms that someone's been in space so that they get treated properly on Earth, because the treatment will be different,” Bruce said.
Bruce said a good example of a medical scenario is the loss of bone density.
“Someone who's just had a weekend or a month in space, then coming back, you know, they go for their physical and someone says, 'You have no bone density, you have osteoporosis. We need to get you on medication right away' and not realizing they were in space. They don't have osteoporosis. They just need to be on Earth's orbit for a little bit. So that's, that's the importance of nurses on Earth also knowing about space, not just those who may be going to space,” Bruce said.
Four years ago, CCBN created an Aerospace Department, garnering interest from the aerospace industry,
“The department makes it much easier for those in aerospace to understand where we're coming from. When we come in as Colorado Council of Black Nurses, they're like, 'Oh, nurses in space. I've never heard of that.' And they, they were reluctant to give us a voice, but now they see where we're coming from as CCBN Inc. Aerospace. We're able to get a foot in the door, and then they learn about us. And so now, of course, they don't call us CCBN Inc Aerospace, they call us the Black nurses,” Bruce said.
Bruce said it feels good for CCBN to be at the forefront of aerospace nursing, but it also feels like a natural progression for the industry.
However, a few decades ago, Black nurses were denied formal certifications.
“My mother was one of those kind of people. She was what we now call a 'doula,'" CCBN founder and member Dr. Margie Cook, a doctor of philosophy in nursing who worked as a registered nurse for decades, said.
Cook remembers her own personal challenge of trying to follow in her mother’s healthcare footsteps.
“I wanted to go to a state school, but I was not allowed to go to the University of Texas Medical School, so I came to Denver to go to school, and I was accepted at Loretto Heights College, which was an all-girl white school, but it didn't matter, the nuns accepted me,” Cook said.
Cook said at the time the University of Texas prohibited Black students from attending the school.
But at Loretto Heights, Cook was welcomed and made several friends after a few early challenges.
"One of my students, my fellow students, asked me to see my tail, and so I pulled up my dress and and showed her that I didn't have a tail. But her parents had told her that we had tails and an extra muscle in the back of our legs. That's why our men could jump higher than white men and could run faster," Cook said. "I think it was just an innocent question because she didn't know and most of them wanted to feel my hair because it was kinky, and so they wanted to experience this difference."
After graduation, Cook began searching for work.
“My mother had asked me to come back to Galveston to work, and I went down and applied at a hospital, but they told me that I would only be able to work at night, from 12 o'clock to five o'clock, because they didn't want the patients to wake up and see that I was a Black nurse, so I refused to do that,” Cook said.
Cook went back to Denver to start working and eventually met the women who she would start the Colorado Council of Black Nurses with.
“We got together one Sunday and decided that we needed to make a group that would support Black people in nursing and in medicine too, and would help our people get better care in the hospitals, because many of the white nurses did not know simple things like hair care or skin care or how to assess cyanosis on a dark skinned person, because it was not taught in the colleges,” Cook said.
Another founding member of the council was Bruce’s mother.
“I had great role models in nursing,” Bruce said. “I went to nursing school at the original Loretta Heights College. So that was before it was moved to Regis, a wonderful experience, as I had a mentor, who's Dr Cook.”
Bruce’s career would take her to new heights.
“I was originally a combat trained flight nurse by the Air Force. I went into the Wyoming Air Guard, and because I knew we had aerospace nursing, I thought, 'Well, this would be a great segue to teach the students of today to go into nursing. And since we have an emphasis on space, let's tell them about space nursing,' right? So because I knew about aerospace, I thought it's just the next natural progression, we'll do space nursing. I did not know that NASA made nurses not qualified to go to space,” Bruce said. “So then our focus changed to ‘Okay, we have to convince the world that nurses belong in space.’”
Bruce and CCBN are working with MSU Denver and Pikes Peak State College to create advanced degrees in aerospace nursing.
“The nurses in this organization taught me that I'm here for a purpose. And that we're all here for a purpose. We're here to do our duty, to give back to our communities, to make sure that everyone has opportunity to have the health, best health care possible, right? So I don't see what I'm doing is something phenomenal. I see it as something that's necessary,” Bruce said.
Bruce said CCBN also hosts a Space Expo every year and they’re hoping more members of the space community will get involved.
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