A week later, as her oxygen levels began to drop, Hurley watched from a distance as her husband James walked out of their home and climbed into an ambulance alone. Hurley followed the family car as the ambulance took him to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in nearby Plymouth, Massachusetts.
“To drop my husband off in an ambulance at a hospital door and say, ‘I love you, but I do not know if I’ll see you again,’ is scary,” Hurley said.
Hurley knew how quickly the condition of a Covid-19 patient could deteriorate. She lost her grandmother to the coronavirus in November and saw her father and grandfather survive the disease.
So Hurley sat in her Jeep Wrangler in a dark and icy parking lot in the hospital for the five days her husband was in the hospital and looked up at the light comb that was her husband’s window. There she could watch him when he got up to use the toilet and see how the nurses looked after him.
After an initial rise, James’ condition worsened and he could no longer speak by telephone.
“I know that the hospital was so busy with so many patients and that the nurses worked so hard, that I could not bother them,” Hurley said. “When he could not talk to me, I was terrified because I did not know what was going to happen next.”
Instead, her lifeline became a doctor who was not placed under her husband’s care.
Providing more than medical care to patients
Dr. Ben Moor recently received his second dose of Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. After being fully vaccinated in early January, he began visiting Covid-19 patients in his hospital.
As an anesthetist, Moor intubated seriously ill Covid-19 patients during the pandemic.
During what he describes as a ‘very, very medical process’, Moor started taking a moment before intubation to think about the person in front of him.
“I kind of got this ritual, you know, you just hold the patient’s hand briefly,” Moor said. “I think there is a value and a need to recognize this moment, that it may be the last interaction this person has. It may be the last hand that presses theirs.”
After making a few first visits to Covid patients, he sends his colleagues by hospital by e-mail and asks if any of those who have been fully vaccinated would be willing to join him for informal visits to Covid patients hold after their shifts have ended.
Now he has a spreadsheet with the names of 46 volunteers in a pilot program he is running with another employee at the hospital. Some volunteers wait to be fully vaccinated, and their names turn green on the spreadsheet after receiving their second dose and a follow-up period. They volunteer to visit a unit outside of business hours and still wear low-level personal protective equipment.
Cheryl Carmody, an occupational therapist at the hospital, reported immediately when she received Moor’s email, but it was only released a week and a half ago. Since then, she has said she has visited three different patients.
Some patients want to talk or look at photos of pets and family members. Others would rather watch television while the volunteer sits in the room, Carmody and Moor said.
As an occupational therapist, Carmody’s duties include helping Covid-19 patients prepare for the physical challenge of returning home.
“Talking to them is the most important thing we can do. Let them know that we are here to show compassion, and we can be with them as a person, not as a healthcare provider,” said Carmody, who had Covid has. -19 earlier in the pandemic, said.
“Just do the right thing”
Moor sees the visits as an intangible but vital part of care, which is necessary for both patients and volunteers.
“These are the people who have given it their all over the last year, the last ten months. And then you give them the opportunity to stay behind, and they thrive similarly,” Moor said. “And it gives back something, a little bit of control or agency, about this awful thing we went through.”
Instead of falling in and out to reduce contact while caring, Moor said the vaccine gives healthcare workers the luxury of eventually just doing the good things while opening up informal communication between patients and family members outside the hospital.
For Hurley, this means that we receive texts from Moor and let her know that he went to unload coffee and a donut for her husband, who is sleeping peacefully.
James came home at the end of January. After a follow-up quarantine to protect one of their immunocompromised children, Hurley reunited with her husband on Friday. Their children followed on Saturday and pinned their father for the first time in more than a month.
Hurley was cleaning their house but could not erase the kiss marks her family left on the house windows while her husband was quarantined.
“They’s a mess, but they’re still there,” Hurley said.
Hurley confirms Moor’s hopes that similar volunteer programs will spread to other hospitals.
“I’m very grateful to Dr. Moor, because if my husband had something happened, I would never have talked to him again,” she said. “And he was the person who allowed me to talk to him.”