Lynne Hewett just had to go to New York. She may have grown up in a tiny town back in Australia, but she didn’t spend three decades in emergency rooms just to end up sitting around in southern Utah while the biggest medical crisis of her lifetime raged on.
She rushed to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010. She treated victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. She even traveled the world as personal nurse to Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, before moving to Kanab with her husband in 2017. It wasn’t quite enough. “Small, rural nursing,” she admits, “not so much for me.”
So when New York became the pandemic’s American epicenter, she turned to her husband.
“You’ve got to do it,” he told her.
She found a job at Mount Sinai Morningside, near Columbia University in upper Manhattan, and moved there in March to find the city changed. Some differences were obvious. The police blockade of 113th Street. Security at the gate of the hospital emergency room, with frantic beeping and whirring in every direction. Her daily check-in to pick up the required N95 mask. The biggest difference was more subtle: COVID-19 isn’t a broken bone. It isn’t a gash. It’s invisible, and you never really know who has it.
So nurses and doctors focus. They move quickly, without getting to know their patients. There’s always another one waiting.
But look past the focus and determination. Look past the screen over her face, streaked with fluorescent glare. There’s something else happening here.
Fear.
Is today the day she feels weak and feverish, that she goes from nurse to patient? But wait, no, there’s something else.
This isn’t just fear of the unknown.
It’s dread.
Hewett sees COVID-19 killing people every day. And she knows she could be next, along with her colleagues and parents and friends.
She often sees familiar faces as her patients are removed from ventilators, deemed too sick to recover. With nowhere to go, they’re often left in a corner. Their families can’t visit; they could get infected. Nurses can’t pay much attention; they have too many patients. So at the end of her shift, Hewett tells her replacement that the patient is dying.
“They’re just a warm body,” she tells herself, “that’s not going to be around in the next couple of hours.” But she knows better.
The warm body is also someone’s sister, someone’s dad, someone’s grandparent — knowledge Hewett carries as she walks 20 blocks south to her apartment. The first two nights, she cried under the weight of this burden.
Now, she’s settled into a routine. She gets home, places her scrubs in a bag, then puts that bag in another bag, and she showers. She shops for groceries and, on days off, she runs laps around Central Park. She’s stopped crying, for now.
But when she returns to Kanab, the images will follow. The sedative of responsibility will dissipate. The recollections will rise. And if you look into her unmasked eyes, you’ll see the remnants of fear and dread once more, the memories of familiar strangers dying alone.
“Nobody’s there,” she says, her mouth struggling to keep up with the gravity of her thoughts. “And it’s, it’s, that is just the most bizarre thing to me.”