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LENOIR, NC (AP) – Chris Rutledge removes an N-95 mask from his tired face, revealing the figure he leaves behind. Her name and a small heart are drawn on the covering face in black marker so that her patients know who she is.
“I look terrible when it comes off,” she jokes, taking a break during her ninth straight day of 12-hour shifts at a temporary field hospital in Lenoir, North Carolina.
Rutledge, a 60-year-old retired nurse from Lisbon, Iowa, is one of dozens of health workers who have treated coronavirus patients in 11 huge white medical tents set up in the parking lot of the Caldwell Memorial Hospital.
The tents became necessary at the end of December when the virus began to invade this rural community in the Carolina foothills, overwhelming the capacity of the hospital. The tents were set up earlier this month.
“We have doubled the number of COVID patients in a matter of days,” said Laura Easton, CEO of Caldwell, who added that the hospital believed it saw its cases peak over the summer. “And we have doubled our hospital census.”
The tents and caregivers were provided by Samaritan’s Purse, an international Christian charity led by evangelist Reverend Franklin Graham, based in Boone, North Carolina. The 30-bed field hospital includes four medical wards and a pharmacy for patients who have been discharged from the hospital’s intensive care unit and do not need ventilators. Four other hospitals besides Caldwell are sending patients here so they can use hospital beds for more serious cases.
(January 25)
“The tent is a scary place for someone who’s never been,” said Rutledge, referring to the patients as she washed her hands for the fifth time in a matter of minutes. “Some of them are very tearful and some of them are actually sobbing.”
But Rutledge calls his work a blessing. Three years ago, she quit her full-time nursing job to join short-term medical missions with Samaritan’s Purse. When the organization mobilizes its Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), Rutledge can be on a plane within hours.
This is not the first time that Samaritan’s Purse has provided aid during the pandemic. The organization, which has partnerships in more than 100 countries, opened its first COVID-19 field hospital on March 16, 2020 in Cremona, Italy, when the virus began to increase in the United States and around the world. Two weeks later, Samaritan’s Purse tents were set up in Central Park in New York City, where Rutledge and other members of his medical team treated hundreds of patients in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the State of New York. The charity also recently erected a field hospital in Lancaster, California.
Although the job is physically and emotionally grueling, Rutledge said she has no regrets.
“People asked me if I would do it again after the New York experience and I said I would do it in the blink of an eye,” she said.
Rutledge is grateful for a supportive husband who encourages her from their home in Iowa. She said her religious faith sustains her through most of the long days – as well as the hopeful moments that seem to come when she needs it most.
She smiles as she remembers the elderly couple who celebrated their 49th wedding anniversary while battling the coronavirus together, and how she accompanied the husband to his wife’s neighborhood to visit him. Rutledge said she cried the first time she saw the couple reunited. She cried again when they were allowed to return home, virus free.
“It was wonderful,” she says.
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