This caring nurse is never off duty

At the height of the coronavirus crisis, Dwayne Brown was clocking 20-hour shifts at Brookdale University Hospital Medical Center in Brooklyn, but even on his days off, he was still working.

Brown, 33, is a full-time RN at the Brownsville hospital. But early on in the crisis, his mom caught the bug and so did a few of his co-workers and friends, so he used his time off to care for them like they were his own patients.

“I live in Flatbush. It’s mostly a Caribbean area, and I really like to care for people within my community because most of them are disenfranchised and they don’t have a lot of education. There’s a lot of poverty and a lot of crime and violence, so as a nurse and as a good nurse, I really wanted to stay within my community and help them and show them love,” Brown, a Jamaica native, told The Post.

Brown described working 20hour shifts regularly when the hospital was short on nurses.

“I came in to help the night shift, and there were only three nurses at night, and usually there’s like 11 or 12 nurses,” Brown recalled. “I had 19 patients . . . It was very stressful trying to keep everybody alive.”

He recounted an experience with one patient who went into cardiac arrest.

“I was the only person in the room, so I had to scream for help so we could call back another code,” Brown said.

Unfortunately, after about 20 minutes of chest compressions, the woman succumbed, leaving Brown frozen in a catatonic state.

“I was not OK. I was really mortified, and I was really saddened,” Brown said.

“It left me really shaken up. I am thinking of myself and my family and my friends and also the 18 other patients I have to care for,” Brown recalled.

When dawn finally broke, Brown didn’t go home to sleep. He went straight to his mom’s house on Long Island to bring her vitamins she needed and then to a fellow nurse’s home to care for her.

“I always say, I did not choose nursing, nursing chose me . . . Some people get joy in caring for people; that’s me.”

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