I am writing this on the day of my release from Salem Hospital. Although triple vaccinated, I tested positive for COVID-19 on Dec. 22. I went slowly downhill and was taken by fire-department ambulance to Pingree 4 at Salem Hospital on New Year’s Eve, where I was confined for 11 days.
It was among the most intense experiences of my life. But it wasn’t all bad. Let me explain.
First and foremost, the medical care I received was extraordinary. Lynn Community Health Center — open, welcoming and competent — was there when I needed testing.
The Nahant Fire Department was there when things became dangerous at home.
The Salem Hospital staff, especially the nurses and nursing assistants, provided not just medicine, but real care in the form of reassuring gestures, a sympathetic ear, and mindfulness toward their job — all under the 24-hour-a-day stress of a pandemic.
Hospital care involves multiple professional teams but it is also a one-on-one experience.
I felt lucky to be cared for by nurses who noticed when I was uncomfortable and stressed, who could see I was virtually helpless. They reached out to me, not just to give an injection or listen to my heart beat or to check my pneumonic lungs. They placed a hand on my arm and tenderly reassured me. Nursing may be a job, but for the people who cared for me, it is obviously a calling.
My nurses were people with family roots from around the world, including North and South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Indian subcontinent. Some are first-generation Americans.
They wore masks, but I could see the smile in their eyes expressing the desire to help and lift my spirits. The length of my hospital stay gave me time to have many conversations with them. I learned their backgrounds. I heard the stories of their children. I learned about their ambitions and their desire to seek higher education through North Shore Community College, Salem State and other schools.
They are the very essence of what America means and that American desire to be free, productive citizens living in a democratic republic.
I made sure I expressed my appreciation for their work. One nurse told me she and a colleague had “a little cry” because few patients seemed to understand the stress hospital workers endure and their need to be understood and supported in the work they do.
I know the importance of being part of a community and having a family that loves you and roots for your recovery.
I had a lot of time lying in my hospital room to think about my childhood as a post-World-War-II-generation kid who grew up in a low-income, working-class family.
I was surrounded by a slew of aunts and uncles always showing up for coffee and/or to lend a hand in a joint project.
I grew up in a neighborhood of small narrow streets, no sidewalks and little lighting with people — Black, white and Hispanic — packed in together but not overcrowded.
Ironically, being sick allowed me to luxuriate in the memories of that time, even the economic struggle my parents faced.
But I also remembered their love for me and my sister (we were both adopted) and their happy struggle to create a post-war life. They understood that education should be available and affordable for everyone. Without the state college, I simply would not have been able to get a higher education.
Folks in similar circumstances today are terribly burdened in ways I was not. They are a striving, hard-working generation. We should be grateful to them but, too often, we are not.
The greatest disrespect we show to hospital workers is to not get vaccinated. It is an insult. No one has the right to infect another. No one.
I do not believe that one can be forced to take a needle but I do believe that, if you are not vaccinated, you should be isolated, suspended from your job, and sent to jail if you violate that isolation.
Does that sound harsh? We could end up losing a million lives to this virus in the United States and perhaps six million worldwide. That sounds pretty damned harsh to me. We’re in this together. We can’t let it drive us apart.
Jim Walsh lives in Nahant.