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A week later, when her oxygen levels began to drop, Hurley watched her husband James from afar come out of their home and get into an ambulance on his own. Hurley followed in the family car as the ambulance took him to Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Plymouth, Massachusetts.
“Dropping my husband in an ambulance at the door of a hospital and saying, ‘I love you, but I don’t know if I’m going to see you again’ is terrifying,” Hurley said.
Hurley knew how quickly a Covid-19 patient’s condition can 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, freezing hospital parking lot for the five days her husband was in the hospital, staring at the spot of light that was her husband’s window. There she could watch him when he got up to go to the bathroom to see the nurses looking after him.
After a first hike, James’ condition worsened and he ceased to be able to speak on the phone.
“I know the hospital was so busy with so many patients and the nurses were working so hard that I couldn’t bother them,” Hurley said. “When he couldn’t talk to me, I was terrified because I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
Instead, her lifeline became a doctor who was not assigned to care for her husband.
Providing more than medical care to patients
Dr Ben Moor had recently received his second dose of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine. After being fully vaccinated in early January, he had started visiting Covid-19 patients in his hospital.
As an anesthesiologist, Moor has intubated critically ill Covid-19 patients during the pandemic.
During what he describes as a “very, very medicalized process,” Moor began to take a moment just before intubation to think about the person in front of him.
“I kind of have this ritual of, you know, you hold the patient’s hand just briefly,” Moor said. “I think there is a value and a need to recognize this moment, that it might be that person’s last interaction. It might be the last hand shaking theirs.”
After making a few first impromptu visits to Covid patients, Moor emailed his colleagues at the hospital, asking if any of those who had been fully vaccinated would be willing to join him in making visits. informational to Covid patients after the end of their shift.
Now he has a spreadsheet with the names of 46 volunteers in what has become a pilot program that he runs with another hospital employee. Some volunteers wait to be fully immunized, with their names turning green on the spreadsheet after receiving their second dose and a waiting period for follow-up. They volunteer to visit a unit outside of working hours, while wearing layers of personal protective equipment.
Cheryl Carmody, an occupational therapist at the hospital, signed up immediately when she received Moor’s email, but was only allowed to volunteer a week and a half ago. Since then, she said she visited three different patients.
Some patients want to talk or view pictures of pets and their families. Others prefer to watch TV while the volunteer is seated in the room, Carmody and Moor said.
As an occupational therapist, one of Carmody’s jobs is to help Covid-19 patients prepare for the physical challenge of returning home.
“Talking with them is the most important thing we can do. Let them know that we are here to be compassionate and that we can be there with them as a person, not as a health care provider, ”Carmody, who had Covid -19 earlier in the pandemic, said.
‘Just do the right things’
Moor sees visits as an intangible but vital part of care, necessary for both the patient and the volunteer.
“These are the people who in the last year, in the last 10 months, have given it their all. And then you give them the opportunity to stay behind, and they sort of thrive,” Moor said. “And it’s giving something back, some control or some agency, to this terrible thing that we’ve been through.”
Instead of sneaking around to minimize contact while providing care, Moor said the vaccine allows healthcare workers the luxury of ultimately ‘doing the right things’, while also opening up informal communication between patients and members. family stuck outside the hospital.
For Hurley, that meant receiving texts from Moor, letting him know that he had dropped off coffee and a donut for her husband, who was sleeping peacefully.
James returned home at the end of January. After a follow-up quarantine to protect one of their immunocompromised children, Hurley was reunited with her husband on Friday. Their children followed on Saturday, hugging their father for the first time in over a month, she said.
Hurley has thoroughly cleaned their home, but can’t bring himself to wipe off the kiss marks her family left on the windows of the house while her husband was quarantined.
“They’re a mess, but they’re still there,” Hurley said.
Hurley echoed Moor’s hope that similar volunteer programs spread to other hospitals.
“I owe Dr Moor a debt of gratitude because, if Heaven forbade me that anything had happened to my husband, I would never have spoken to him again,” she said. “And he was the one who allowed me to talk to him.”
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