A nurse who practices in two New York City hospitals says she worked for about a week while infected with coronavirus and had to pull a trick to finally get herself tested. Now she fears she may have infected her colleagues and her family.
The nurse, who is 44 and has no underlying health conditions, asked to remain anonymous because she fears she’ll be fired.
For the past several weeks, she’s been working mainly with coronavirus patients. She says on March 8 she started to feel an achiness in her back. She thought it was menstrual pain, but now she looks back and wonders if it was the first sign of coronavirus.
She continued to work. Then on March 24, she felt chest pain and realized what it could be, especially because, the day before, she’d lost her sense of smell, which she knew might be associated with coronavirus.
“I was scared. I thought this is it. I definitely have the virus and I’m going to die,” she said.
She gave her husband a book she’d made before the outbreak with the information he’d need if she died, including financial accounts and her wishes for end-of-life medical care. She told him about her desire to be cremated, and what she wanted to be done with her wedding ring.
She wanted to get tested at one of the hospitals where she works, but colleagues told her the hospital wasn’t testing staff members, and neither was the employee health clinic.
She came up with a plan: In the middle of the night, she called the emergency room to ask who was working. When she heard that a coworker she knew well, a physician assistant, was on duty, she headed over.
“She said, ‘You have to go to employee health,’ but I knew employee health doesn’t test, so I said, please, just this one time, do it. I just want to make sure I don’t have it. I don’t want to spread anything, and she said ‘OK’ and she tested me,” the nurse said. “So my testing came under false pretenses.”
The next day, the nurse called in sick, and for the next four days, she wasn’t scheduled to work.
On March 30 she was feeling well and returned to work. Halfway through her shift, she received her test results.
She was positive and went into isolation at home.
