- Title: A pandemic nurse's love letter to New York
- Date: 28th May 2020
- Summary: NEW YORK, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES (RECENT) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) COVID TRAVELING NURSE, MEGHAN LINDSEY, SAYING: "So, yeah, unfortunately, I have taken care of a lot of COVID patients who have not made it. And the craziest thing about being out here is their families aren't allowed to be there with them. So I've had to stop being a nurse and step in for the family
- Embargoed: 11th June 2020 02:58
- Keywords: COVID Meghan Lindsey Missouri Winthrop NYU Hospital coronavirus nurse pandemic
- Location: NEW YORK, NEW YORK + NEOSHO + JOPLIN, MISSOURI + FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS, UNITED STATES / IN AIR
- City: NEW YORK, NEW YORK + NEOSHO + JOPLIN, MISSOURI + FAYETTEVILLE, ARKANSAS, UNITED STATES / IN AIR
- Country: USA
- Topics: Health/Medicine
- Reuters ID: LVA003CFUGJEV
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: The coronavirus pandemic has restricted almost everyone's freedoms in America but for Meghan Lindsey it has done the opposite. This is the freest she has ever felt.
Traveling to New York City at age 33 to work as a COVID-19 nurse was the first time that Meghan, a married mother of two, had ever left southwest Missouri.
"It was my first time on a plane," she said, describing how she came to work 12-hour shifts in the intensive care unit at NYU Winthrop Hospital.
"Flying into New York was the first time I'd ever seen the ocean."
There are many stories about the lonely coronavirus deaths in the city's hospitals and the traumatic work of the nurses who staff them.
Meghan's story is about unexpected opportunities. It's a story of how the pandemic gave a woman the chance to strike out into the world, confront danger and make a difference, and how her husband stayed home to care for their daughters. It's a story about new beginnings.
Meghan said she had always wanted to do something for her country.
"And I know that I have helped. And it may just be a small, significant piece that we all individually brought to the table," said Meghan.
Meghan's first nursing shifts in New York were a shock.
There are a lot of sick people in Missouri with chronic diseases like diabetes, where the progressions are slow and the declines are familiar.
COVID-19 patients are stunned by a virus that turns their lives upside down and in many cases ends them.
Because they were coronavirus patients and visitors were banned, it was Meghan who would hold their hands as they died.
Despite all of the death, Meghan's time in New York City's COVID-19 wards was unexpectedly affirming. The pandemic gave Meghan something that her life in Missouri so far had not: a feeling of everything sliding into place.
"When I became a nurse, I always was very passionate about what it means to be a nurse. The calling of a nurse and your duty to serve," Meghan said.
But when she graduated from nursing school, it wasn't like she imagined. It turned out to be just a job. She mourned.
But New York gave her a chance to make a difference.
Her kids, she said, are proud.
"They've seen me conquer my fears and stand up for what I need to be doing, what I was called to do, and I did it, you know, without second guessing myself. And they know I would do it again," Meghan said.
Meghan is from a small town in Missouri. Most Sundays, she goes to church. Her mom was a manager at Walmart and her dad worked construction. Before he lost his job to the pandemic, her husband Aaron sold fire suppression systems to small businesses.
Meghan is the first in her family to finish college and has long held her family together. As thrilling as it was to be in New York, it was also hard.
Meghan often wondered if she should come home. Her husband Aaron told her no. He and the girls were fine, what she was doing mattered and he was proud of her. He sometimes called her superwoman.
Being a COVID-19 travel nurse isn't glamorous. Meghan had to wear protective gear during her shifts and there was a lengthy decontamination process when she got home each night. She lived in a hotel room with another nurse and had to find a laundromat every few days to wash her scrubs.
But sometimes it did feel like a grand adventure. She saw the Statue of Liberty. She heard someone speaking Russian. She learned how to fold a slice of pizza.
Restaurants sometimes gave her and her friends free food "because we're nurses," she said with a bit of awe. She took selfie after selfie standing in the middle of empty New York City streets and no cabbies honked at her.
Her husband Aaron said he was sometimes a little jealous (it's New York), occasionally worried (again, New York), but mostly he was just really proud.
Now, at the end of her contract, Meghan is unsure of what the future holds.
She is back in a small town in the Midwest. She no longer has a job and she is coming off the biggest high of her life. She sometimes asks herself, will I have the desire to go back to this life?
Something about New York stood out to her: people there had aspirations to make something of themselves.
(Production: Shannon Stapleton, Andrew Hofstetter, Dan Fastenberg) - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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