When Krysta Gainey left Plant City in the late 1990s to work in New York, she probably never thought she’d be on the front lines of two events that changed America forever.
One of them was September 11, 2001. Gainey, a nurse, got emergency room duty on that fateful day and said the following days were like “picking up all the pieces.” Though there was much death and suffering that day, there was an end in sight.
The other was COVID-19, which she called “a completely different experience.”
“This is ongoing and I think it’s gonna go on for quite some time,” Gainey said.
Gainey joined the staff at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Yonkers, roughly 20 minutes north of New York City. Westchester has been hit hard by the virus — more than 33,000 cases have been confirmed — and Yonkers itself has had more than 6,500 cases reported, according to the White Plains Daily Voice.
Many of those cases came from within the hospital.
“On my first day I thought, ‘I don’t understand, why is it so short-staffed?’ There was a huge ICU population and it was only projected to get worse,” Gainey said. “I was numb when I found out the reason there wasn’t much staff was because they were all out sick with COVID. Some of them are still out sick. It was scary in the beginning.”
The beginning, Gainey said, couldn’t have been much worse. On her first day at the hospital, she started work at 7 a.m. Her first COVID-19 patient died at 7:15 a.m. He was a 42-year-old man, younger than Gainey herself, and had no comorbidities and no past medical history.
A few hours later, another patient was lost.
“It was nerve-wracking at the beginning,” she said. “I had sleepless nights worrying if I’d get sick, if my family would get sick, if I would die.”
When she was able to leave the ICU to treat patients with less severe cases, Gainey welcomed the chance to be able to talk to them. In many cases, the hospital staff was all they had.
She said one patient, who was placed in a makeshift bed in a part of the hospital that otherwise wasn’t being used, had no one to talk to and was desperate to call his wife. He told Gainey he passed out at work and was rushed to the hospital for treatment, and he was never able to call his wife to let her know where he was.
Worse, he had no idea how long he had been in the hospital.
“Stuff like that was really hard to handle,” Gainey said. “Now we’ve gotten a handle on communication as far as the outside world. Everybody’s more informed and they know you can’t go to the hospital. Now we immediately get the families involved and keep them up to date.”
Gainey called the man’s wife from her own cell phone and put her on speaker so they could talk. They were the “sweetest couple,” she said.
The situation has evolved since Gainey got there. Though there’s still much to learn about the virus itself and how to treat it — the early days were “kind of like throwing darts at a wall” to see what would actually work — everyone is better prepared to deal with COVID-19. Medical professionals are more aware of what works and what doesn’t. More people are coming in early enough to be treated, whereas more people spent the early days waiting to go to the hospital until they got “really, really sick.”
“By that time, they needed to be intubated,” Gainey said.
The death rate in Gainey’s area has slowed down and talks of reopening have advanced. Gainey does worry about the effects of reopening too soon leading to a second wave, so she encourages people to “take care of each other.”
“Maintain social distancing, stay home if sick, wear a face mask if out in large groups — I think it’s an act of humanity and it would be selfish of us not to take care of everybody else,” she said.
Her family has gotten lucky thus far: no one has gotten sick. Gainey has designated part of her house as an area only she can use, so as to decontaminate every day when she gets home. No one in the house can come into contact with her until she’s showered and changed clothes. She got tested for antibodies last Friday and hoped for good news on that front.
As someone who’s been on the front lines, as close to the virus as possible, Gainey wants people to know that no one is totally immune to the virus, no matter how healthy they are and how strong their immune system is against diseases it already knows how to fight. She also hopes people will focus more on what matters most than material things they’ve lost to shutdowns and closures.
“Family is really important,” she said. “Live life one day at a time and don’t wait for tomorrow. It might not be there. Family is important, material things are not. So many patients never got to say goodbye. It’s very heart-wrenching. I think we lose track of that in our day-to-day lives.”
Have you or someone you know left Plant City to treat COVID-19 cases in New York City or other heavily affected parts of the country? If so, the Plant City Observer would like to tell your story. Email Associate Editor Justin Kline at jkline@plantcityobserver.com.