A prayer before day’s unknown
S.I. health care worker helps support many
member of Local 1199SEIU, keeps showing up anyway. Her work with the infected is hands-on: Washing, bathing, toileting, feeding and walking the contagious patients. Her 36-bed area in the telemetry unit, once reserved for heart patients, is now packed with coronavirus cases — along with “stress, anxiety and fear of the unknown,” she recounts.
Yet she and her colleagues continue to show up and suit up, fighting on the front lines of the war that by Tuesday morning had killed 1,550 New Yorkers and infected over 75,000.
Fish started her health care career in 1996 as a certified nursing assistant, though nothing in her long career prepared her for what awaited in the past month. Over the past two weeks, as the patient population exploded, the hospital workers were left to wear the same masks for days on end and argue over an insufficient number of hospital gowns.
“We don’t have the protection we need,” Fish says evenly. “We don’t have the feeling that they’re rushing in to protect us. You can’t help but get angry.”
None of her eight-hour shifts are like any of the preceding ones, she said. “Everything is changing day to day, shift to shift, minute to minute.”
The staff relies on one another for support and relief under dire circumstances that never seem to abate as they hustle to aid the afflicted.
“The first thing you think of is your coworkers, and we’re all holding each other up,” said Fish, now in her 12th year at the hospital. “It’s a great group. We try to joke when we can, keep each other’s morale up and be strong for each other.”
Staten Island University Hospital is the borough’s biggest facility, launched in the 19th century as a one-room infirmary and now a 668-bed teaching hospital.
Fish acknowledges the whole thing can get a bit dizzying at times. She gets in a little bit before her shift begins to get the lay of the land, and acknowledges the past two weeks produced contradictory emotions.
“Some of us are stuck between being thankful we still have jobs to go to,” she explains, “and being terrified we still have jobs to go to.”
When her shift ends, Kim drives home and carefully removes all her work garb at the front door. She throws everything in the washer, takes a shower and gargles with the same saline and lemon mixture. Worn out and worried, she finally falls asleep.
And then it’s 5:30 a.m. again.