Our series begins in New York City, the center of the early days of the pandemic, with a story from Harvey Katz, one of the hosts and creators of Take Two Storytelling. In this story, Harvey, a brand-new nurse, is thrust into the hectic environment of a Brooklyn ICU at the onset of the pandemic. (Scroll down for a transcript and photo.)
Harvey’s story is followed by an interview with social scientist Kasley Killam, on the impact of the loss of physical contact due to the pandemic.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this episode on Monday, Nov. 16!
Story Transcript
March feels like a million years ago and not because time flies but because time is a social construct and my social distancing game is like super strong these days.
Like four billion years ago in early March, we had our first and maybe our last ever family vacation. We went to Disney World. We touched handrails. We stood in long lines of crowds that collectively sighed in long exhales. Their hot breath on my neck was like a nice breeze. We didn't know that ‘it's a small world’ was a factual statement and not just the mutterings of animatronic optimists.
People kept talking about this virus in China and I thought they were all hypochondriacs. The flu, I kept saying. Worry about the flu.
I took a chill pill and ate a Pluto-themed veggie dog that passed through no less than seven hands before entering directly into my mouth. Hands. Hotdog. Mouth. That sounds ludicrous and straight up reckless now.
Less than two weeks later, I was pulling the acrylic nail off a woman who was gasping for breath. The oximeters can't get a good reading through the fake nails so I was in a near panic and using my own nails to pry off one of hers.
I'm a brand new nurse and this was two months into my employment at my very first nursing job straight out of nursing school, so I was, and I still am, living and dying by the numbers because, well, instinct is not instant, so that nail had to go.
She was also in liver failure which has this intoxifying effect on the body, so she kept ripping off this BiPAP mask that was pushing air into her wrecked lungs and then she was subsequently suffocating on repeat. Her oxygen monitors would alarm every 10 minutes or so and so I'd have to race into the room but not before I went through this arduous process of putting on my PPE.
And you could put on PPE a million times and it's still a clumsy process when you're in a rush. Your hands become these dumb, worthless blocks with performance anxiety while someone on the other side of a windowless door just slips into an oxygen-deprived blackout and hurries towards the light.
You have to resist the urge to just run into the room and start mouth‑to‑mouthing a stranger with a potentially deadly infection. The floor isn't lava but the air is. I kept thinking about people who are drowning whose panic ends up killing the person trying to save them, which in turn kills them both.
Harvey Katz, in his PPE.
Alarm. Run. PPE. Re-oxygenate. Leave. Alarm. PPE. Over and over for hours. This was my first COVID patient. All I could think was, oh, my God. We are not prepared. This is not okay. We are not okay. There's no way I'm going to be able to do this day after day.
That morning was the last time I would kiss my wife for months. I wish I would have known that and I would have made it a kiss that could sustain us for a while, but it was just a have-a-good-day-I'll-come-home-and-kiss-you-later kiss. That night I slept on the living room floor. A few days later, I moved out of my house and into my friend's empty apartment.
My wife is immunocompromised but she's also my sounding board, my therapist, my person, my little spoon, the cutest of the cutlery. I've been leaning on her support extra hard recently because in the second, then the third, then the fourth opinion of my doctors I may or may not have cancer and the mystery was only going to be solved by a surgery booked for April 10th. It was daunting to think about going through this without her. It was heartbreaking to think about her going through this alone. I packed for a week not knowing I'd be gone for nearly three months.
Right after that patient with the fake nail, I got transferred to the ICU and I was a nurse there as the first wave of COVID grew and crested in New York City. We took care of the sickest patients in the hospital. It was the closest I would hope I will ever get to living in a sci-fi movie. Every patient had COVID. Every patient was being kept alive by machines, machines that fed the milky formulations and vasoconstrictors through their IV lines, machines that pushed air into their lungs, bags that collected less and less urine each day as their kidneys failed.
Patients were given a 20% chance of survival but I suspect that number was elevated. We wore PPE even in the hallways. Between the gowns and the goggles and the masks it was hot and disorienting. Every shift was like preparing for a wrestling weigh-in. By the end of it, I had a raging headache and I couldn't stand up without spinning.
There's this level of intimacy between a patient in the ICU and a nurse that's unreproducible in any other part of my life. They're totally and completely dependent on you. You know more about their bodies than their mama. You know more about their bodies than they do. You know more about their bodies than you know about your own body.
And there were no visitors allowed in the hospital at this time so I made sure that I spoke to them extra kindly even though they were sedated because you never know what might get through. And I always took a minute to hold their hands and tell them they hadn't been abandoned. Like I said, I'm a new nurse. Better at caring than curing at this point in my career and my love language has always been access service.
At this point in the COVID story, caring was about all we could do, but every action, every act of service with the patient would put us at great risk and was discouraged by my superiors. So I would sneak into the rooms under the guise of fixing an IV and I'd rearrange their swollen limbs and linger there for just an extra minute with my hand on their forearms. I did it for the both of us. There was no other human touch at this time for me other than that between me and my patients.
Even between the healthcare workers, there was no high fives, no hugs. All facial expressions were hidden behind masks. It was bizarre and cold. I felt the need to connect to my patients, to reconfirm that this was all real.
Beyond the physical acts of tending to their body as it lived on separated from their consciousness, there's a pact we make to fight for them while they can't advocate for themselves, and to know and respect when their battle is over.
You use IV drips, fentanyl and propofol in pursuit of this painless amnesia. It’s the least you can do. You watch their vital signs for any signal that the fog is thinning and they become alert to the true terror of their situation because what COVID does to a body can be horrific and most people just want to die in their sleep. And every one of my patients died.
One of them was actively dying for hours. I watched him from the other side of the glass door riding the line between here and gone. He wouldn't let go until I went into his room and I held his hand, and then it happened really quickly. I wish them all well on their journey. Before I zipped up the body bags, I'd send them off with a safe travels, because who knows what happens after the here and now.
Newscasters were comparing COVID to a war. The hospital even gave us these stars from retired US flags. War's not my jam but the metaphor was fitting. I remember accounts from injured soldiers bawling over missing limbs, not because they were mourning their loss but because it meant they couldn't return to the battlefield and their platoon would have to go on without them while they were left in the dark on the sidelines with all their feelings and without all that consuming distraction of survival. Seemed crazy to me then but I came to identify my fear of getting sick whether from COVID or cancer as largely a fear of abandoning my post and it didn't seem so crazy anymore.
When you wear all that PPE, you're no longer identifiable as an individual. People can barely see your face and your badge is covered, so you're recognizable only as a team member, a soldier, if you will, totally de-individualized.
But outside the hospital I became hyper individualized as the gap between what I was experiencing expanded exponentially from what my friends were going through while they sheltered in place. Their version of the monster was loud and big. Its destruction made headlines and caused economic collapse.
My version was this rhythmic beeping until it wasn't and then it was just quiet. I visited my monster daily and day by day it told me more about itself. My monster lays silently on surfaces until everything I owned became ours together.
It's impossible to unsee what I saw with COVID. A couple weeks into it, I found myself ragged with the repeated trauma and I found it difficult to connect to anybody but my fellow healthcare workers. But I couldn't live in this bubble alone because outside of the hospital things were going badly.
During this time, my dad fell off a ladder and broke his pelvis. An elderly relative I care for fell and I left one shift one night to a voicemail saying she was in the emergency room. My wife was grieving the loss of our touch. And my doctor cancelled my surgery, that surgery that would determine whether or not I had cancer, a disease that killed my mom and was now smoldering in the plasma of my dad, a fact I ironically found out in March at Disney, the happiest place on earth.
The stress of not knowing was taking me to a level of distress I hadn't visited in my 40 years. Fortunately, the height of COVID in New York City was a pretty good time to be a nurse. Almost nobody said no to you. Your likeness was marketed as heroic, and any commercial that didn't feature a nurse was just a barbaric symbol of capitalism. Nurses, we could sell a Subaru to a Subaru salesman. That is to say we had some pull.
So towards the end of April I called my doctor and I pleaded for her to please, please do my surgery as soon as possible. And because I was a nurse a.k.a. a hero without a cape, she made special accommodations for me and was able to set up my surgery within that week.
I was almost looking forward to it. That week had been my worst one yet. In my straw that broke the camel's back moment, that elderly relative who I cared for dismissed my pleas for her to be careful saying, “There are worse ways to die.” Then I flew into a rage challenging her to name one, and then at that very moment I realized the level of trauma I had been experiencing.
That night I took a paper cup filled with whiskey to Walgreens, drank it all, outstretched my arm into a shelf of their seasonal goods aisle and emptied the entirety of their 70%-off Easter candy selection into my cart. That night, I drank Cadbury mini eggs straight from the carton in what I now refer to as my Fiona Gallagher total breakdown moment.
And you know you're having a shitty go at it when surgery is the highlight of your month, but I think I just needed to be cared for. I needed to be the patient. I needed someone to take on all the tasks of being in a body for a few hours so I could just sleep off the reality of being a human at this time.
Just before I was being led to the operating room, I asked to use the bathroom one more time and the doctor said, “I mean, we're going to put a catheter in you, so go if you'd like to but no need to do it on our behalf.” And instead of being horrified, it just sounded like luxury. Imagine that. They even pee for you in this place.
Laying on the operating table with my arms tied down and useless, a nurse rubbed my head so kindly. Touch, touch, touch. The anesthesiologist told me his plan. Fentanyl then propofol, just like what I gave my patients. The promise of analgesia and the gift of amnesia.
More people entered the room. The surgical team had at least eight people in it. I knew in just a matter of minutes I'd be naked and manipulated and entered and I'd be observed in a manner that in any other day would have me nauseous with the humiliation and shame, but butted up against the loneliness and fear I felt over the last month, it just felt so nice that so many people cared. And then I was asleep.
Waking from surgery is like crawling through a sweet, soft marshmallow then realizing it's in a fire. The nurse asked me if I was in pain and then pushed those magical opiates into my veins. The doctor told me all went well and that she was 90%sure I didn't have cancer and I could leave whenever I was ready.
I didn't know how to tell her I didn't want to leave this place where human touch still existed and they take away your pain and they tell you they're 90% sure you're going to be okay.