A lens on life and death: recording the costs of Covid. From the article:
Over the past two years, the most serious effects of the COVID pandemic happened mostly behind closed doors, in private homes and hospitals, where more than 800,000 Americans have died and many more have been sick. Former news photographer turned Charleston ICU nurse Alan Hawes is documenting part of that enormous human toll in pictures and CBS News told his story….
Before he became a nurse 11 years ago, he spent 23 years as a newspaper photographer. Those skills allow him to tell the stories of the patients….
More of Hawes’ photographs document COVID’s grip as it tightens. He spoke of one patient he photographed texting loved ones and explained the reason he took the photo. “I felt like I knew where he was going. I knew it was going to happen to him in the next couple of days,” he said. Two days later, he was barely responsive. The patient, Hawes says, is still alive and still at the hospital. Hawes says he was unvaccinated.
“I have quite a few times had a patient who’s unvaccinated, and when they come in, I’ll look at them and I think to myself, ‘You did this to yourself.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t invest any emotion in you.’ It’s part of being a good nurse, having empathy and you’ve learned,” he said. “Once you hear the stories of some of our patients from their family members, you can become a fan of that person and you just know that they’ve made a bad decision.”
Hawes says nurses are broken right now. He says he feels like he is….
Patients and family members give him permission to photograph them. “I think people have a message that they want to get out there,” he says. His images include a mother holding a picture of her newborn she cannot touch and a girlfriend who keeps a bedside journal.
“Every night I tell all my patients, all my family members, this is a roller coaster,” Hawes says. “This is two steps forward, one step back.”
One of his patients, Keam, who was able to tolerate a ventilator without heavy sedation managed to write a message on a small whiteboard: “I feel miserable.”
“As the day went on, she ended up getting a little bit more sick,” Hawes said.
So he ordered a guitarist to provide music therapy. He says he is hopeful she will survive her fight.
“I think so, just because she’s got her, she’s so unique and just her personality is she’s just got such a spark of life, I can’t imagine, if she has anything to do with it.”
For the collection of Coronavirus Tales on our site, see here.
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