Joe Holt reports for a 12-hour night shift in the ICU at Franciscan Health Olympia Fields on April ... [+]
I am an ethics professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. During the coronavirus pandemic I am also a volunteer nurse’s aide two nights a week in the intensive care unit of the Franciscan Health Olympia Fields, a hospital just south of Chicago. Almost all of our current ICU patients suffer grievously from the novel coronavirus with bleak prospects for recovery. I wish there weren’t so many people hurting so badly at this time, but since there are I want to be where the pain is greatest and try to help.
Members of the Notre Dame community are proud to be known as the “Fighting Irish” and commercials aired during home football games feature members of the community fighting for some worthy cause and ask the challenging question “What would you fight for?” Given my past Jesuit training as a nurse’s aide and the pressing need for health care reinforcements on the front lines of the coronavirus battle I realized this was my fight.
My saintly Irish mother once said I was trying the patience of my guardian angel after I spent time as a Jesuit in Nicaragua during the Contra War, in a leper colony in Nigeria and, after my first year of law school, doing human rights law in Belfast during the Troubles. That may be, but I don’t believe my angel’s patience has run out.
I have always loved being “Professor Holt” but have found over the years that it does my Bronx Irish soul good now and then to be just some guy who makes the beds and empties the bedpans. I also continue to be drawn to that work because of my grounding in Jesuit spirituality.
The fight on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic is long, arduous and precarious. Those of us who wrestle with death twelve hours at a time in the ICU with nothing protecting us but the thin plastic layers of our gloves and gowns know full well that we are at risk ourselves. Data released the Centers for Disease Control earlier this month reveal that 19% of those afflicted with the coronavirus disease in the U.S. are health care workers.
Part of what makes ICU work difficult for the professionals working there is that they are used to providing medicine and care and seeing patients get better as a result. But there isn’t as much getting better as could be hoped for in the ICU these days and that can be discouraging. Yet we fight on.
A Franciscan Health administrator explained to me that since chaplains during the pandemic were not allowed to see patients except virtually that they hoped I would be part nurse’s aide and part undercover chaplain. I suggested that made me a “naplain.”
When patients lose their fight with the novel coronavirus I also volunteer to prepare the bodies for transport, offer prayers for them and escort them to the trailer outside the hospital serving as a makeshift morgue. The ICU nurses have seen too much dying during the pandemic so whenever I can relieve one of them of that task I’m glad to do so. In the first six 12-hour night shifts I have worked, I have taken six bodies to the morgue. One day a few of weeks ago our hospital briefly ran out of body bags.
It puzzles and irks many of us working on the front lines that so many people seem not to take staying at home, mask wearing, and social distancing very seriously. If they saw the ravages of this horrible illness as we do, up close and personal, they would quickly acquire a stronger sense of both reality and mortality.
As an older male I know I fit in two high-risk categories. So, yes, there is some chance that I might go down in this battle. But I am one of the Fighting Irish, and there is no chance in hell that I am backing down.
