Wed 3 Feb 2021 05.00 EST
Ruth Coker Burks has never been an obedient person. When she was visiting a friend in hospital and noticed a nearby door covered in red tarpaulin, the word “biohazard” stamped across it, she lingered. She watched the nurses draw straws, or toothpicks, to decide who would enter the room; then she watched them all walk away. In that moment, she knew: “I was going in there.”
The man in the room was so thin and white that he could barely be seen against the bedsheets. “I asked him if I could help,” Coker Burks says. “He wanted his mother. I thought: ‘Oh, OK, well that’s great. I can do that. Then I’ve done my good deed.’”