“The Essentials” is a series depicting the stories of the workers on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis, in their own words. This includes first responders and health care workers, but also the cashiers, daycare employees, plumbers, delivery drivers and others who keep Hampton Roads up and running while many are keeping safe at home. If you are an essential worker with a story to tell, we’d love to hear from you. Email matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com with the subject line, ESSENTIALS. Please provide your name, age, city of residence, and a little bit about yourself and the job you do.
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Erik Johnson, 37, Virginia Beach
Paramedic at LifeCare Medical Transport
I’m a military veteran. I was a medic in the Army. Now, I’m a civilian paramedic with LifeCare Medical Transport. We provide emergency, nonemergency, basic life support, event life support, specialty, and critical care and other various services throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia.
On March 30 at about 5 p.m., I received a phone call from my employer that American Medical Response had requested several units from us in response to FEMA requests to provide ambulances and medical services in New York City. By 10 o’clock that night, I was on the road to New York.
My first thought was that I really needed to start laundry. We were kind of expecting to go up. We were only supposed to stay up there for about two weeks, but I ended up staying for a month. I’ve done FEMA activations in the past, generally for hurricane responses. I’ve slept in the back of my ambulance or flipped a cot over in a warehouse type of situation, but this trip was unique in the fact that New York City still had its infrastructure intact so we were placed in hotel rooms.
On day one, we reported to Fort Totten, which is a base of operations for FDNY. We went there, did our in-process procedure where we checked in with AMR, FEMA and FDNY. We were issued phones and placard numbers from both organizations, which is how our ambulances were identified. From there, we moved to the staging ground which was the parking lot at the Bronx Zoo. There were several hundred ambulances in this parking lot, which was probably the size of your typical Walmart parking lot.
The first few days I was up there were very grim. The hospitals were so, so overloaded. Even though they had additional staff coming in from all over the country, they were still overloaded to the point that it was hard to manage all of the patients.
Our mission changed several times while we were there. The very first week was hectic. We did not get a lot of downtime that first week. I think we flip-flopped between day and night shifts three times in a five-day period that week. We worked 36 hours on our very first mission. We went to Flushing Hospital Medical Center to do what they call a decompression mission, which means that the hospital was so overloaded with COVID-19 patients that they needed to get some patients out. We did this in conjunction with FDNY. They provided a large bus that was constructed as a medical evacuation platform. We evacuated 11 patients from that hospital to two separate hospitals in upstate New York. The first was about 31/2 hours away and the other was about another 45 minutes or so past that.
A few days later, we were rotated to 911 response. We again worked with FDNY. They were responding to about 7,000 calls a day. Their normal operation is about 4,000 per day, so they were doing nearly double their typical response. We were taking calls and helping out with whatever needed to be done, but a majority of them were related to the virus.
Every team we met was just outstanding. They all wanted to stop and thank us, ask us where we were from. It was like being accepted into a family immediately off the bat. There were ambulance companies from all over the country, from as far away as California and Colorado. They invited us to their stations to eat and offered us their couches to rest on.
Later, we were transferred back to doing interfacility transfers. The most rewarding mission that I had — we were attached to the USNS Comfort for about a week. We drive over the HRBT all the time. When you look to the west of that, there’s the Comfort. Here we are in New York City, and you look to the west, and there again is the Comfort. It was a nice reminder of home.
Toward the latter half of it, the missions became discharges from the Comfort, people who had recovered well enough to go home. Anytime we discharged a patient from a hospital or the Javits Center — which is a convention center that was set up as a field hospital by the military — there were cheers throughout the entire facility. There was a song that played at the hospitals over the PA system, “Here Comes the Sun.” And as we would walk down the hallways with the discharged patients on our stretcher, the staff would clap and cheer for the patient. It was a sense of relief and reinforcement that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. That things are going to get better.
We were able to come together as a community, as a whole. We did this despite our backgrounds, despite where we came from and despite all of the negative social media that’s out there — the people who are deniers, the people who are claiming that this is a hoax or that the isolation and quarantine orders are government overreach or not needed. That was disheartening, especially with what we were seeing firsthand, that this was for a very valid reason and that we needed to do this to save lives and entire communities.
7 p.m. is the universal shift change for hospitals. At 7 p.m., you could stand outside, especially if you’re near one of the hospitals, and you could hear the whole city, cheers and bells and applause from the citizens of New York City cheering on the hospital and medical workers. It was very motivating, very reassuring to hear. As we were driving our ambulance around, people would cheer for us. One lady in particular almost jumped out into the middle of the street and shouted, “Thank you for being here. Thank God for all of you.”
This interview has been condensed and rearranged for concision and clarity.
Amy Poulter, 757-446-2705, amy.poulter@pilotonline.com
