From RMU lacrosse to COVID-19 front lines
Nurse, 22, dealing with death daily
You’re 22, and this is your job: Hold the FaceTime camera up toward the man dying in his hospital bed, so that family members standing outside his room can say their final goodbyes via iPad.
“I try to hold the patient’s hand,” Kerri Sayrafe says. “I try to rub their arm so they hear the voice, so they can feel a touch and feel like their loved ones are there with them. You just feel so bad for the families, because they can’t be in there.”
They can’t be in there because COVID-19, in its final, wicked act, obliges them to stay away.
Sayrafe talks through tears as she finishes her thought.
“I can’t even imagine saying goodbye to your husband or wife of 50 years or your mom or dad over FaceTime. I can’t imagine. I think I would need security to keep me away.”
So many questions came to mind Thursday as I spoke with this remarkable woman. It was powerful to leave the abstraAcriztosnataCtairdsintiaclsal realm of COVID-19 — the one that said as of 5:05 p.m. Thursday, 75,423 Americans had succumbed to it — and head toward the front lines. Even if by phone.
I knew pieces of Sayrafe’s story. She played lacrosse at Robert Morris from 2016-19. She set a school record by scoring nine goals in a game. She took a nursMiniamgijDoobGlprh1eien0ns months ago at NYU Winthrop Hospital in her hometown of Long Island, N.Y.
She was working in the carNdeiwoEtnhgloanrdaPcaitrcioPtasitntsdbursguhNSretwgeeiOlcerlraesalns intensive care units until just about every unit became a COVID ICU when the pandemic hit. Winthrop was an early epicenter. It even neeSdaneDdieagonCohaurgtedrsoor ICSUanuFnran-cisco der tents.
Those are the facts.
But what’s it like inside the rooms, where heart and horror merge and where every visit carries the risk of contracting COVID?
WhAraizotn’sa to be imAt-lanta mersed in a pandemic fresh out of college, arriving at 7 a.m. for 12-hour shifts in a face shield and N95 mask, walking into rooms wInhdeiarnaepolis
doing the breathing for a given patient, where drip
“I understand this
is just something I have to do. It’s my calling.”
— Kerri Sayrafe
medications must constantly be adjusted and where every once in a while a FaceTime call is arranged from a death bed?
Sayrafe was overwhelmed at first. This wasn’t the rookie year she had envisioned. Like many of her colleagues, she would ask herself at the end of a shift, “Did I do enough?” She would see friends crying in the break room.
And even though the cases have decreased, the pressure remains intense.
“A lot of us can’t sleep at night,” Sayrafe says. “We’re all having these weird dreams about our patients and what’s going on with them. Just a lot of stress. I think you’ll see a huge spike in [health-care workers] who need to go to therapy, who have anxiety and depression and even PTSD.”
Her colleagues help keep her going, as do her friends from Robert Morris, many of whom are in similar lines of work.
The good moments help, too. That’s the heart part — like when a high school classmate’s uncle survived the virus. Or when others are discharged to cheers and music on the floor. Or when the local fire department cheers the workers on their walk across the bridge from the parking garage to the hospital. Or when a retired FDNY worker sent the nurses a note saying just as he was called a hero after 9/ 11, so should they right now.
“That brought tears to my eyes,” Sayrafe said.
Mostly, though, it’s a sense of personal duty that keeps Sayrafe going. Her parents, whom she lives with, taught her early on that the world is much bigger than a single person.
Sayrafe couldn’t imagine not showing up. It’s a lot like sports — the sacrifice, the teamwork, the leadership skills. It’s like pulling an allnighter at nursing school and showing up in high spirits for the next day’s lacrosse practice.
She just does it. “I understand this is just something I have to do,” she
says. “It’s my calling.”
I wondered about one more thing — how it affects her to hear people minimizing the pandemic, even calling it a hoax, or (as in Denver recently) staging protests that result in people berating health-care workers who stand in the street to block their path.
“You know, seeing that, it makes me feel like what we’re doing is not good enough,” she says. “It drives me insane a little bit. I think they’re lucky they don’t get to see what we see every day. I would never wish them to see what we see or for them to be in the hospital. I just wish people would realize this is not a ‘plan-demic.’ It’s not a hoax. It’s real life, and we have thousands and thousands of people who have died. I’ve had co-workers who’ve died.
“Everyone thinks it’s just the elders. I’m seeing 30-, 40-, 50-year-olds, people with no past medical history, no prior illnesses.”
I’m seeing, or at least hearing, a person that I would want to take care of my loved ones. I can tell you that. And I’m not alone. RMU women’s lacrosse coach Katrina Silva couldn’t talk enough about the quiet little player with the huge heart.
Silva’s father passed away of a heart attack in December. It has occurred to her since that he never would have made it through COVID-19, and she can’t fathom what a death in isolation would have been like.
“God,” she says, “I hope he would’ve had someone like Kerri to take care of him.”