At left is Suzi Frase, an Onalaska High School graduate now working as an intensive care nurse in Brooklyn. At right is Amy Cheney, a nurse who lives in Adna but is now working in a hospital in Queens, New York.
I don’t know that we can say it enough on this editorial page — our medical professionals deserve our respect right now, as they literally suit up for work everyday, attempting to treat a brand new virus none of us really understand yet.
More than our respect, I believe they deserve our trust.
In the past couple of weeks I’ve interviewed two nurses with local ties who have put their lives on hold to travel to New York City to work in some of the hardest-hit hospitals in a city with one of the heaviest tolls from COVID-19.
The nurses I’ve talked to are incredibly brave. They know how deadly the disease they’re fighting is and they go to work anyway. They try not to think about how scared they are, or about who they might lose that day. They’ve thought about what might happen if they get sick. After work, they go home and cry, then check in with family and friends. Then they go back to work for another 12 hour shift. I don’t know if I could do that. Could you?
And they’re not afraid to tell it like it is.
“I know it’s not happening in Lewis County, that’s why you’re frustrated and you want things open,” said Amy Cheney, a nurse who lives in Adna but is now working in a hospital in Queens, New York. I spoke to her as she had her first meal in hours — cold macaroni and cheese after a long shift at the hospital. It was a few days after thousands of protesters rallied against stay at home orders much closer to home in Olympia.
“I know this is tough, I know this is terrible for you,” she said, speaking through the newspaper to her neighbors in Lewis County. “Look at the positives. It isn’t in Lewis County, but it could be. In every little borough here there are hospitals. They are all overwhelmed.”
Nurses like Cheney are facing a disease they’ve seen kill seemingly healthy people frighteningly quickly. They see people come into the hospital who die without ever seeing their families again. They lose patients so fast New York hospitals had to start using refrigerated semi trailers to store the bodies.
It’s difficult to square the two images in my head — of the nightmare stories I’ve heard from these nurses with the images of angry protesters with assault rifles on the steps of the Washington state Capitol, waving signs saying “Give me liberty or give me COVID.”
This isn’t a joke.
“One shift, they lost 20 patients. In one shift,” said Suzi Frase, an Onalaska High School graduate now working as an intensive care nurse in Brooklyn. “I have no motivation to lie about this. What would be my motivation? Do you think I’m happy that we lose so many people they end up in a freezer truck? That’s like something from a horror movie, but that’s what’s happening here.”
Frase said last week that numbers were down and the freezer trucks were gone, but said it’s not time to act like this is all over.
“If we play this safe, maybe the worst is behind us,” she said. “Because nobody wants this. No one deserves to die like this.”
Cheney and Frase talked with me not because they’re comfortable being hailed as heroes, or because they want to draw attention to themselves personally, but because they want to keep us safe.
“If I can help some people and shed some light, I’m cool with it,” she said.
Meanwhile, Frase is gaining a social media following with her Facebook live chats.
“The one thing I hope we take out of this is we’re all in this together, we have been such a divided nation,” Frase said. “I hope the one thing we get out of this is we are all in this together and we need each other.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I also hope readers take from these stories not fear or anxiety, but inspiration to help in their own way, and respect for professionals like Frase and Cheney and for their colleagues here in Washington.
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Natalie Johnson is the editor of The Chronicle. She can be reached at njohnson@chronline.com.
