For Joan Phillips, the hardest part was seeing her patients on a stretcher, the paramedics carrying them away, the doors of the ambulance closing behind them. When her nursing home patients got COVID-19, they couldn’t stay in the nursing assistant’s care — they could infect others. They had to be taken to the hospital.
Phillips worried about who would coax them to eat or cheer them up. She worried that the virus could take them away in a flash. She always thought, as she watched the ambulance pull away, about holding their hands again when they returned.
But none of them did.