Adirondack nurse moves mountains to help Big Apple
This Adirondack hospital worker is as tough as his upstate home’s bedrock granite.
Chris Swiesz is among the nurses from Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh, near the Quebec border, who have been flocking to New York City to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Swiesz, 45, previously made trips to the Big Apple only to see the Yankees play or to enjoy a Broadway show.
Now he has been working in the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Inwood, Manhattan, since mid-April.
“I asked my bosses at Champlain if I can come down to the city to help out. I’m glad to be here,” Swiescz told The Post. “The city was a huge hot spot.”
He said it was clear when he arrived that the virus had taken a heavy toll on hospital staffers.
“A lot of the nurses had gone out sick. They were on 14-day quarantines. Not only are you dealing with all these patients, but your hospital staff was depleted,” Swiesz said.
“You could really tell they were under the gun. They were definitely fighting a battle.”
The uptown hospital’s emergency department has 30 beds, he said, but the ER was overflowing with more than double the patients during the peak of the COVID crisis.
Amid all that, the staff took a gut punch when Dr. Lorna Breen, medical director of the emergency department, committed suicide on April 26. Her funeral service was livestreamed at the hospital.
“It was a real somber movement,” he said.
Swiesz, who has worked at Champlain since 2001, including 18 years as an ER nurse, said the pandemic gave him a personal challenge of “coming out of my comfort zone in the North Country.”
He said he wanted to see whether he could handle the volume and intensity of working in a big-city ER and “getting used to the sickness of the patients.”
But while the worst appears to be over, there are still many patients being admitted, he said.
“They’re coming in with breathing problems. Their oxygen levels are low. They’re pale. We’re seeing patients coming from the nursing homes. It’s still in the community. It’s still out there.”
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