Thelma Jackson covers her mouth and nose with a mask, then shields her face with a visor. But underneath it all, she still smiles as she walks into work.
That smile feels essential to her job at a children’s hospital near Tampa, Florida. Especially now, while coronavirus makes it hard for families to visit.
Outside, the air is balmy, the lawns manicured and dotted with flowering trees. But in the cancer ward, where Thelma cleans rooms and swabs bathrooms for a living, the air is stale, every surface sterile.
She came to America from Jamaica for a housekeeping job at a hotel, the Don CeSar in St. Pete Beach. Then, five years ago, she came across an opening for a custodian at the hospital. The work is similar, but not the same.
“I see different people, different faces,” she says, “and you can talk with them.”
Most of those faces belong to children in a harrowing circumstance. Right now, to protect them from coronavirus, they can only have one visitor at a time.
Sometimes, as Thelma walks in and out of their rooms, she catches herself almost removing the mask out of habit, the impulse to share her own smile, with a gap between her two front teeth.
But she keeps the mask on, and she swallows extra vitamin C and D, and she guzzles garlic tea with ginger and onion. She’s careful — has to be careful — not to hurt the kids.
She already hurts enough.
The boy’s name was Benjamin, and before acute lymphoblastic leukemia stole them, thick blonde curls decorated his smiling face. He was one of many kids Thelma has befriended here.
As the disease progressed, Benjamin exhausted himself on a trip to the bathroom. Thelma walked in, even though his room wasn’t on her rotation, and proclaimed, “The Lord is able; the Lord is able.” Ten days later, she checked in again. Benjamin’s color had returned. He’d managed to eat. “My heart just overwhelmed me,” she said.
But the improvement didn’t last. Benjamin approached the end, and his family knew it. So Thelma made sure to stop by before a 2017 church trip to High Springs, two hours north. “I won’t be here for the weekend,” she told him, “but I hope to see you when I get back.”
The part of her job that she loves is the part brings pain. The part that bonded her with Benjamin and his family; the part that led her first to pray and then to cry for hours when she came back from that trip and Benjamin’s mother told her, “He’s gone”; the part that inspires her to send supportive messages to former patients and family members every morning.
Now more than ever, she’s embracing this role — more joy than duty. When the families can’t come, Thelma fills in. Sometimes she talks to the patients about the virus. Sometimes they play games and watch TV. The pandemic has almost made her job easier. She can talk to more of the children, and for longer.
She does miss shopping. Not for jewelry or handbags, but for the juice and snacks she’d buy for the kids when their parents were away.