The Nurse Who Came by Sea
“It really makes me hope and pray the public takes things seriously.”
n Easter Sunday, as the noon sun bore down on New York City in bloom during what is surely its saddest spring in a century, a 50-foot white-hulled sailboat named Turning Point arrived in New York Harbor to berth in an otherwise empty marina in Brooklyn Bridge Park. On deck and ready to throw a line to the waiting dockhands was 26-year-old Rachel Hartley, an ICU nurse who had just sailed the nearly 250 miles from Hampton, Virginia — keeping watch overnight with her husband, Taylor, over the 34-hour passage — and ready to make the boat her home for the next two months. She is one of thousands of out-of-town medical professionals answering the call to provide reinforcements to the city’s hospitals.
Hartley,
who has been a nurse since 2015 and spent two years working in an ICU,
was working in surgical pre-ops in Lynchburg, Virginia, when, in early
March, her hospital began to cancel all but the most urgent surgeries.
Then, for several weeks, she said not a day went by when she was not
“called or emailed or texted by one of the nurse-staffing companies”
seeking people with intensive-care experience for coronavirus epicenters
like New York: “Holy cow! There was such a need!”
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