‘Itmeans dying alone without your family’
Nursewatchedoutside roomas her father died.
As an Intensive Care Unit nurse on theCOVID-19 floor, Lindsey Fairchild knows the symptoms of the coronavirus and the process when someone loses their battle.
So last month, as she sat outside her father’s hospital room at Atrium Medical Center in Middletown, unable to provide care or say goodbye to him, Fairchild felt helpless despite all her medical experience.
Shewas a family member about to lose a loved one, a scene she has witnessed countless times since she started caring for COVID19 patients last spring in a Daytona Beach, Fla. hospital where she has worked for seven years.
“Torture” is how she described watching her father’s final breaths. “As a nurse, I want to help people, sit at their bedside. But I couldn’t. It makes you want to break the door down. You want to visit so badly, but you know this virus is so deadly. It was a very crippling feeling to have.”
Her father, Wayne Oney, of Middletown, possiblywas infected with the coronavirus while watching his daughter, a student at Kettering Alter High School, play on her junior Olympic volleyball team. One of her teammates tested positive, then she and Oney tested positive.
The girls quickly recovered from their symptoms, but Oney was admitted to Atrium and spent 26 days in ICU. The first 10 days, he wore a mask while oxygen was pumped into his lungs, but when his symptoms worsened he was placed on a ventilator.
Fairchild was at work in Florida caring for a COVID19 patient when a nurse at Atrium called to notify her about the need for a ventilator.
“I knew what thatmeant for us,” she said during a phone interview, noting patients typically don’t survive the virus if they require a ventilator. “Itmeans dying alone without your family by your side.”
She flew home and days later, the family decided to take Oney off life support. Oney, a U.S. Army veteran who served during the Vietnam War and worked as a machinist with Voith Paper Co. for 20 years, died on Nov. 8. He was 69.
Since then, Fairchild, 41, who graduated from Kings High School in 1996, has
written about the seriousness of the coronavirus on her Facebook page in hopes of saving one life. Somewho have readher posthavebeen critical of her stance, saying COVID- 19 isn’t real, a pawn in the recent presidential election.
“It’s not about politics; it’s about humanity,” she told this newspaper.
On her Facebook page, she wrote: “It’s not a sta
tistic. It’s not ameaningless lockdown to ruin the economy. It’s not a hoax faked to rig an election. It’s a killer.”
Her words were accompanied by a photo she took with her phone. Shot from behind a glass door at Atrium, it shows her father being cared for by nurses.
There is a reflection in the door. It’s Lisa Oney, his wife of 15 years.
“It’s a painful reflection in a piece of glass,” his daughter wrote. “It’s a husband, and a father, and a grandfather, and a friend crossing over without his family surrounding him as he does. It’s nurses holding the cold hands of dying patients over and over again. It’s machines that have been shut off because a virus beat them at their own game. It’s a daughter capturing her father’s last moments on a phone so people can see it in its rawest form. This picture is COVID-19.”
Fairchild said she plans to take a travel assignment in the next two weeks and work with the COVID-19 ICU nurses at Atriumwho cared for her father in his final weeks.
Hermessage to thosewho haven’t been touched by someone with the coronavirus: “Try to understand that this can happen to anyone. No one is exempt.”