As the Covid-19 pandemic began to abate and a degree of normalcy started to permeate Greenwich Hospital, Dr. Christopher Davison, medical director within the emergency department, recalled his experiences in an essay that he shared with his colleague, Dr. Spike Lipschutz, vice president of medical affairs.
Davison and Lipschutz discussed the essay and considered expanding it with input from other members of the Greenwich Hospital team. Medical professionals, transporters, registrars, security personnel and others within the hospital were invited to contribute essays, poems, artwork and photographs that detailed their experiences during the height of the Covid crisis.
The resulting work was published earlier this month as a hardcover book titled “Greenwich Hospital Emergency Department and Covid-19: Our Voices. Our Stories. Our Journey.” Fifty-three members of the hospital’s workforce contributed to the contents of this book, with most of them becoming published authors and artists for the first time.
“I was a major in English in my undergrad,” laughed Davison. “And I wrote an article with some reflections of what it was like, and a lot of acknowledgement and praise of the ER staff. I wasn’t sure what to do with it, whether I submit it to the Greenwich Hospital publication or some local newspaper.”
Davison’s article noted his experience with Covid as both a physician and a patient.
“I was one of the first people to come down with Covid,” he said. “I remember this date forever because it was April 1, April Fool’s Day. This was just a few weeks after our first patient in Greenwich Hospital was diagnosed with Covid. I went home from work on April 1 and I was just extremely tired, exhausted, beyond what I normally would be, and I took my temperature and I had a fever. That was frightening because this was two weeks into it and it was very hard to get people tested – for that reason, the mortality rate was very high, so you really did not want to have Covid back then.”
In his essay, Davison noted that the pandemic kept him from having meaningful times with his mother, a septuagenarian who succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He hoped that anyone who reads the new book “can get something out of it, because the whole world was impacted by Covid, and we all had to deal with it in different ways.”
Among those contributing to the book was John Beaujour, an emergency department technician, who expressed gratitude for being able to share his experiences in print.
“It’s amazing just to put your voice out there and tell your story,” he said. “Hopefully, people who felt the same way at that time can relate to it. And even those who had no idea what we went through can have an understanding.”
For Beaujour, the greatest challenge during the pandemic was the “adjustment from the workplace and home” the hardest part is how you go home to your family and try to protect them from the virus.”
Beaujour added being able to share his thoughts in the book “inspired me to maybe collect more information on my journey of being a health care worker, then collect those experiences maybe later in life and put them in a book.”
Also contributing to the book was Christina Cannone Epstein, a registered nurse who initially came to the project with trepidation.
“When I first was approached, I think I was a little bit overwhelmed to bring up those emotions again,” she said. “At that point in my life, it was a very, very scary time, so to try to put those words on paper was a little bit challenging.”
Still, Epstein persisted, even though she had no previous professional writing experience.
“Knowing that people will be reading what I wrote was a little intimidating at first,” she continued. “I had to make sure my grammar was correct, and I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t offending anybody when I was writing my paper.”
But Epstein was excited to be part of what she described as “such a fabulous opportunity to capture history with a little bit about what we all went through.” Despite 17 years of nursing experience, Epstein admitted Covid was an unprecedented challenge for her.
“As a health care worker and as a nurse, it goes against every grain of your body to not be able to run into a room whenever you need to,” she said. “I remember sitting at the desk and wearing three masks and not knowing and watching my patients through the window struggling to breathe and knowing there was really nothing I could do for them.”
As with Beaujour, Epstein felt a creative spark being unleashed with her contribution to the book.
“I’m finishing my master’s in nursing education, so I never thought of myself as a writer before,” she said. “But I’ve really grown to love research and I’ve actually learned to be more of a writer through my education, so you never know what the future holds.”
Davison was also invigorated by the project and hoped any future literary projects would not be based on a pandemic.
“We’re very fortunate that the hospital funded the publication of the book because it was not inexpensive,” he said. “What I would say is that door would always be open now if there was ever something else that is significant. Within our departments, I’d leave that option open.”
