How an upstate nursing home battled to treat COVID-19 in its most vulnerable population. NDHopper reports
Photo-Illustration: photos courtesy Fort Hudson Health System It was lunchtime on Easter Sunday, and Ben wasn’t eating his pie. Amanda Barber, a certified nursing assistant on S Wing, a unit at Fort Hudson Nursing Center that houses people with advanced dementia, knew this was odd. She has been working in S Wing since 2011, when her experience of her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s led her to request shifts there.
As COVID-19 was found in the United States in February at a nursing home in Washington, then was confirmed to have arrived in New York, then creeped into nearby health-care facilities upstate, and as nursing homes across the country became the site of more than 40 percent of the nation’s deaths from the virus, staff members at Fort Hudson hoped and prayed it would not come to their facility — and that if it did come, it wouldn’t make it inside S Wing.
Since March, the S Wing staff had been trying to keep the residents distanced. The task was endless. Residents on other wings may follow instructions to stay in their rooms or rely on staff for help with walking, thus regulating their movements, but S Wing residents are too fit and too oblivious.
The staff tried to isolate the sick while looking like aliens. The N95 masks in the full-body personal protective equipment they wore deprived residents of the main feature they use to recognize caregivers: their faces. Residents would give the staff funny looks, and even when their charges weren’t too hard of hearing and could make out the voices garbled by the N95s and face shields, caregivers couldn’t always clarify matters by saying their names; often, residents didn’t know them.
The staff called a Zoom meeting for families of the Fort Hudson residents. “The tension was palpable,” Quaresima remembers. “Oh my God. It’s here. What do we do? How do we handle this?” “I had a guy one morning who just got up, took his pants off, walked down the hallway, had diarrhea down the hallway into another room,” Quaresima recalls. “We were fighting a losing battle against the spread of the virus the second that person got infected.”
Among the shifting government directives the Fort Hudson staff followed, one quickly felt particularly stark: Anyone who died with a COVID-19 diagnosis should be put into a body bag. Two days after the first woman passed, when an 88-year-old great-grandmother of 18 who had been in hospice care on S Wing also died, it had all become too much. The staff couldn’t zip the bag.
A 40-minute drive away, Becky Lawler struggled to sleep. About a week prior, on her last Zoom call with her father, 95-year-old Frank Smith, who served in the Coast Guard at Normandy, Lawler had seen his condition was worsening. He struggled to catch his breath. Now, she had been told he had very little time left.
Saunders noticed that some form of internal unrest led the sickest to strip off their clothing; an acquaintance whose brother had tested positive described it to her as a sort of effervescence, a bubbling in the arms and chest. To protect their privacy, she would close these residents’ curtains and gently tie a light gown around them.
The caregivers had experienced the deaths of residents many times before. It was part of the job. But not at this rate. And not without being able to hold the residents’ grieving relatives. These family members had often first cared for their loved one in their homes as his or her dementia grew, before finally trusting and turning to Fort Hudson. Many often visited S Wing, offering companionship to the caregivers, even into the night, for years. The staff considered them family, too.
Residents dressed up in Grease-themed tee-shirts — the men as T-Birds and the women as Pink Ladies. Photo: Fort Hudson Health System Weeks into the outbreak, some S Wing residents began getting better. On Mother’s Day, as an 85-year-old woman who had loved playing Nintendo and drinking orange soda with her grandchildren became the tenth S Wing resident to die of COVID-19, ten other residents had reached the New York State standard of recovery.
Cerro-Conlon and her family had decided when Cerro arrived at Fort Hudson that they would not send her to a hospital for any illness that seemed irreversible, and while they were reminded that they could change their mind, they did not waver after her COVID-19 diagnosis.
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