Before I could say another word, Mr. Smith cut me off. “I’m so happy you called. I’ve been so worried. I brought my wife to a hospital in Queens on Thursday night and I hadn’t heard from anyone since. But, wait—you’re telling me she’s in the Bronx now?” His tone seemed to shift from gratitude to anger as this fact sunk in. I looked at the date on the computer screen in front of me. It was Tuesday. 

“Lost and Found in the Bronx” is the title of the Reflections essay in the June issue of AJN. Author Kristopher Jackson is an acute care NP at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco and spent two weeks as a volunteer in the Bronx in New York City during the height of the pandemic. He centers his essay around his care of a frail, elderly woman on a COVID unit.

In an effort to determine whether she would want to be intubated or not, he reaches out to her husband, who apparently has been wondering if she is alive or dead for several days, unable to locate her since she was taken to the hospital.

To inject a little humanity in impossible circumstances.

The suffering of this husband is clear. Waiting days for information, then having to let go of his wife without having a chance to reassure her of his presence and say goodbye is a terrible thing.

Likewise the suffering of the nurses and physicians who found themselves somewhere along the chain of care, swathed in PPE, doing their best to inject a tiny bit of human contact and meaning into deeply alienating environments, to accompany patients or their families in real or virtual space for a bit of the way.

The one-page essay is free for the month of June. While the emergency pandemic conditions described in this and many other accounts are mostly in the past, at least in the U.S., they are likely to stay with many nurses in unexpected ways for years to come. Something was definitely lost; maybe in some cases something lasting was also found.

(Podcasts of this and other Reflections essays are available on the AJN website.)