Jamie Edens and Ryan Ward arrived in New York City last week after a whirlwind road trip from their home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The two intensive care-unit nurses were on their way to help fight the novel coronavirus.
New York state has been hit the hardest by the virus, with more cases than any other state and more deaths than the 9/11 terror attacks. With so much need, particularly in New York City, Gov. Andrew Cuomo has temporarily suspended licensing requirements as part of a plea for doctors and nurses from out of state to come and help.
Medical professionals like Edens and Ward have heeded his call, responding to an online post from a staffing agency seeking crisis-traveling nurses.
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In video diaries, in which they spoke about the scenes inside the hospitals over their first few days, Ward and Edens both described the staff as overworked.
"It is bad," Ward said. "They are absolutely overloaded. Patients are incredibly sick. Everyone's [on a ventilator]. Everybody's COVID. It's all the things you would absolutely expect. The nurses, they're overworked. They're having a hard time and they've been doing this for weeks."
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With nearly 150,000 cases of COVID-19 in the state -- over three times that of New Jersey, which has the second most cases -- many health care workers within New York are also stepping out of their specialties to help with the crisis.
Dr. William Levine, head of orthopedic surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and one of the top orthopedic surgeons in the city, previously operated on shoulders and elbows. Now, he and one of his residents, Dr. Lynn Ann Forrester, are working 12-hour shifts in the emergency room, treating COVID-19 patients.
"I was doing stuff that I haven't done in 25 years," Levine said. "We have all these ICU beds that never existed and all these patients that are filling those beds who are ventilated, they're sick and they need care that our emergency room teams and our regular ICU teams cannot cover by themselves — just can't do it."
Levine said the situation has caused him to break down in tears more "in the last couple of weeks than in the last couple of years," but then "the weight of this whole experience catches up with you."
Levine won't stop working on COVID-19 patients until they get word that the number of cases has already plateaued and begun dropping, he said. With 2,400 coronavirus patients in the New York-Presbyterian system and about 650 of them on ventilators, he said they've "still got a lot of work to do and a lot of help to get us past this point."