“This picture is COVID-19:” Nurse from Middletown shares her family’s experience with coronavirus

The picture shows Oney as he dies with two nurses beside him. Oney’s wife, Lisa Oney, is reflected in the glass of the window.

“That is her watching her husband (my dad) take his last breath while she watched helplessly from behind a door ten feet away,” Fairchild wrote in a post on Facebook.

“I snapped a photo capturing the reality of what covid-19 looks like from the perspective of not only my dad as the patient, but also as a grieving family, and lastly, the view of a COVID-19 ICU nurse. It is all encompassing,” she said. The nurses that stayed with Oney sat with him for three hours after they took him off life support.

Fairchild said that her father had mild asthma, though did not need oxygen or an inhaler and diabetes, which was under control with medication. She said he was much healthier than other 69-year-old patients she sees.

After her father died, Fairchild went right back to Florida to continue her work in the intensive care unit.

“We have seen so much death and it is weighing on us. We are tired, but still fighting for your loved ones everyday,” she said. “More and more nurses are leaving the bedside because the stress and heartbreak are becoming too much to bear any longer. We fight to save people inside the hospital and fight with the public about wearing masks outside the hospital.”

She shared her experiences with the seasonal flu as it compares to COVID-19. She said that those who get the flu and recover often go on to lead normal lives. She has seen patients with COVID-19 need therapy, dialysis after kidney failure, new heart problems and blood clotting disorders. She said she has seen patients need amputations after a lack of oxygen flow to their hands or feet.

“If you die from COVID-19 there is zero comparison that can be made between that and dying from the flu. If you die from COVID-19 you are isolated from your amily and loved ones. You have no visitors to comfort you or sit with you as you take your last breath,” she said. “If you are lucky a stranger in the form of a nurse holds your hand through rubber gloves, behind a mask and goggles, without a facial expression or identity. If you are unlucky you die all by yourself with no one to comfort you because the hospitals just don’t have the staffing to keep nurses in every room all the time. It’s a painful, lonely, isolated death. That is the truth no one is talking about and if you haven’t seen it for yourself you really can’t grasp the contrast between the two.”