Can nurses forgive COVID deniers they treated?
ABINGDON, Va. — The hospital executives at the lectern called her a hero, and the struggle that had earned Emily Boucher that distinction showed on her face: in the pallor acquired over 12-hour shifts in the intensive care unit, the rings beneath eyes that watched almost every day as COVID-19 patients gasped for their final breaths.
The pandemic had hit late but hard in the Appalachian highlands — the mountainous region that includes southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee — and over the winter many of its victims had ended up on ventilators tended by Boucher and her fellow nurses at Johnston Memorial Hospital.
They were enduring the traumas known to ICU workers across the world: days filled with death, nights ruined by dreams in which they found themselves at infected patients’ bedsides without masks. But they also were enduring a trauma that many doctors and nurses elsewhere were not: the suspicion and derision of those they risked their lives to protect.
Conspiracy theories about the pandemic and lies recited on social media — or at White House news conferences — had penetrated deep into their community.
When refrigerated trailers were brought in to relieve local hospitals’ overflowing morgues, people said they were stage props. Agitated and unmasked relatives stood outside the ICU insisting that their intubated relatives only had the flu. Many believed the doctors and nurses hailed elsewhere for their sacrifices were conspiring to make money by falsifying COVID-19 diagnoses.
Boucher and her colleagues were pained by those attacks — and infuriated by them. Unlike their exhaustion, that anger rarely showed on their faces, but it was often there: as they scrolled Facebook to see local ministers saying God was greater
than any virus, or as they stood in line with unmasked grocery shoppers who joked loudly about the COVID hoax.
Fighting misinformation
On that December morning when she became the first person to get the coronavirus vaccine in the 21 counties served by her hospital’s parent company, Ballad Health, Boucher breathed deeply as she described what she and her co-workers were up against. They were fighting not just for their patients’ lives, she said, but “against misinformation and reckless practices that have led to this virus getting so out of control.”
“I will never stop trying to convince everyone about the reality of COVID-19,” she said.
Not everyone dismissed the suffering and death caused by the coronavirus. Churches and community groups had sent
food and homemade masks to Johnston Memorial, and families had tearfully thanked Boucher and her co-workers for saving lives. Now medical science had delivered vaccines that could end the pandemic, and a new president who didn’t undermine that science soon would take office.
“Today, for me, is a turning point,” she said. “Today is an incredibly hopeful day.” As the needle slipped out of her arm, she raised and pumped her fist. A grin was visible at the edges of her Ballad Health face mask.
In the coming days, though, friends began texting her screenshots of comments on Facebook, where local TV news stations had posted photos and videos of her inoculation. Boucher had abandoned Facebook earlier in the pandemic. Looking at the messages, she remembered why.
Commenters speculated that
the syringe might not have contained any vaccine. Others said she must be getting kickbacks from Pfizer. Boucher returned to her crowded ICU knowing that to some, her vaccination wasn’t a turning point and she wasn’t a hero. She was just another part of the hoax.
‘They just say you’re lying’
“You’re living this reality that people don’t understand, and there’s nothing you can say that will convince them,” Boucher, 40, later explained. “They just say you’re lying.”
The post-traumatic stress experienced by nurses and doctors during the pandemic has been compared to what soldiers suffer. But in places still rife with COVID denial — often rural, conservative and devoted to former President Donald Trump — there is a difference: It’s like having fought in a war that many believe never took place.
Boucher came to Johnston Memorial in 2017 when she and her husband, Shawn, moved from South Carolina to Virginia to start a farm. With a friend, they began raising chickens in Sugar Grove, a 40-minute drive northeast of the hospital.
Southwest Virginia calls itself the heart of Appalachia, and its idyllic valleys are home to both a proud history and a concentration of the ailments — obesity, heart disease, diabetes, drug addiction — that plague America’s poor. Boucher was devoted to healing people with those chronic conditions, and at Johnston she joined an institution that seemed to have earned its patients’ trust.
Founded in 1919, the 116-bed hospital was among Washington County’s largest employers. More than a century of births, broken limbs, appendectomies, heart attacks and routine checkups had brought the families of the hills through its doors.
And so when the pandemic began, Boucher and other health care workers at Johnston believed their patients would rely on their guidance for staying safe. They were wrong.
Jamie Swift, a registered nurse who oversees infection prevention for Johnston and Ballad’s other hospitals, recalled her realization that “people would trust Facebook more than they would trust us” — and her horror at the consequences as the winter surge began.
“You work all day, and you see people who are struggling to breathe, and you see the horrible side of what COVID can do. And then you go home and you see restaurants that are packed and grocery stores where person after person is going in without a mask,” said Swift, who in December was briefly hospitalized herself with the coronavirus. “There have been times when I broke down and cried. It was just devastating, because you leave the hospital and you come out into a community that doesn’t believe that it’s real and in what it can do.”