Doctors, nurses fighting pandemic fear infecting their loved ones
When the message arrived Monday morning, Katie Patel was sitting on the floor in her living room, watching two of her children build a tower from multicolored tiles as her third, a newborn, lay sprawled on a mat beside her.
Patel, 32, suddenly faced one of the most difficult choices of her life, so she called her husband, an emergency room doctor at Mercy Hospital South in St. Louis. Busy with patients, he could not pick up then but called her back later that day.
A colleague at the urgent care clinic where Patel worked as a nurse practitioner had self-quarantined after feeling sick and being tested for covid-19, the deadly disease caused by the coronavirus, she told her husband. Short-staffed, the clinic wanted Patel, who still had two weeks of maternity leave left, to come back early.
By then, the threat of the virus no longer felt distant. It had arrived, not just in the United States but Missouri, St. Louis and maybe one day soon, the couple feared, it would appear in the their own home. Patel knew she would go back to work eventually, but she had thought those two weeks would give her enough time to prepare: to buy a new breast pump, to rehearse in her mind how she’d stay safe at work, to make a plan for who would look after the children - the oldest was 3 — since it had become too risky for her mother, in her 60s, to care for them.
Now, though, on the phone with her husband, Patel decided she could not wait. People needed her. She would go back.
“If we get sick,” she thought, “we’re just going to hope for the best.”
It is a grim sentiment shared by thousands of health-care workers on the front line of a pandemic that is expected to deluge the nation’s hospitals with new patients in the coming weeks. The people treating them understand what that means. They have read the stories from Italy, about doctors dying.
They have heard of the findings from Wuhan, China, where nearly 1 in 5 health workers who caught the virus ended up in severe or critical condition. In the United States, where everyday activities have almost skidded to a halt, the virus has upended the lives of doctors and nurses more than anyone else.