The Helpers by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

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It was the worst at night. Michelle was scared to go to sleep because she knew people with Covid would sometimes go to sleep and never wake up. But she always did wake up, feeling flashes of heat and covered in sweat, her chest tight, whether from the illness or from anxiety she couldn’t really tell. Michelle’s mom knew someone at a nearby urgent-care clinic, which was doing five tests a day, so the day after failing to get tests at Montefiore her parents managed to snag some and confirm what they already knew.

Michelle was nervous about her parents getting worse and being the only person there to take care of them, so she set an alarm on her phone to make sure to check on them every two or three hours during the night. She would listen to her father snoring and in each scraping, rattling breath she heard a warning that her parents might not make it. Her dad had sleep apnea, hence the snoring, which was really the sound of his brain potentially being deprived of oxygen.

During the day she made sure they drank a lot of tea and took steam baths, leaning their heads over pots of steaming water draped in towels to keep the mist inside. She had no appetite herself for anything but tea and soup. Just walking around the house left her exhausted.

Yet she knew that a few blocks away, her hospital was getting inundated with patients, her colleagues were being worked past their limits, and she wasn’t there to help. Staff members were dropping; the first week Michelle called out sick, she was one of maybe five or six people she knew of that did so, then another five left the following week. Some were getting hospitalized with critical symptoms. James Goodrich, a 73-year-old pediatric neurosurgeon at Montefiore, a Vietnam Marine veteran famous for his skill at separating conjoined twins with fused brains, died of complications from COVID-19 on March 30.

Her friends were in danger, her family was in danger, she herself was in danger, and she was powerless to help. She barely had the power to fill her own lungs. A manager called Michelle several days into her absence, in Michelle’s mind to pressure her to come back to work—the manager had already returned after being sick the prior week. She felt guilty. And so very, very weak.

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