Cady Chaplin is an intensive-care nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital. She just turned thirty. Her closest friend at work is Karen Cunningham, who is twenty years older and made a mid-career turn from photography to nursing. When they met, five years ago, Chaplin and Cunningham hit it off immediately. They live in the same neighborhood—South Park Slope, in Brooklyn—and often take the subway together to the hospital, which is on East Seventy-seventh Street, in Manhattan. Along the way, the two I.C.U. nurses talk about everything from the latest Tilda Swinton movie to the intricate and dangerous procedure of intubation.
These days, the days of COVID-19, Chaplin and Cunningham inhabit a twilight world that is celebrated by their fellow New Yorkers but only faintly seen. Cunningham, an admirer of the “Country Doctor” photographs that W. Eugene Smith took for Life, in 1948, wanted to document what was going on in the intensive-care units and got permission from the hospital to bring her camera to work. She photographed her friend over two long shifts in mid-April.
Lenox Hill normally has four I.C.U.s; now, with the coronavirus raging through the city, nearly the entire hospital is a critical-care unit. Chaplin and Cunningham’s twelve-hour shifts are a blur of sickness, urgency, risk, and loss. Trapped by necessity behind their masks and face shields, inhaling their own exhalations, they experience ferocious headaches. Moments of relief are rare and fleeting. The hospital P.A. system plays “Here Comes the Sun” when a COVID-19 patient is being discharged, and the staff cheers as the gurney carrying the lucky person rolls by. All too often, though, the Beatles are interrupted by an announcement of a Code Blue: an emergency call for C.P.R. The death toll is relentless, and older doctors and nurses have told Chaplin that the only thing comparable to COVID-19 was the height of the AIDS crisis. But nothing ever equals anything else. In those days, no one was “sheltering in place.” Now every patient, every colleague, every surface, every friend is a potential threat. Chaplin, whose roommate left for the relative safety of New Jersey weeks ago, comes home to solitude.
“Sometimes, after my shift, I walk in my apartment, slide down the door, and cry,” she says. “After I take a shower, I can’t quite figure out what it is I am supposed to be doing. Coming down from these shifts, hearing codes all day on the intercom, it’s hard to get out of that fight-or-flight response. I’ve been eating a lot of salted black licorice.” She calls friends and paces the apartment. For exercise, she shadowboxes while holding cans of chickpeas in each hand and listening to Lizzo, Lil’ Kim, and Tierra Whack. Recently, Chaplin’s parents drove in from Long Island and dropped off Lucy, the family’s French bulldog, to keep her company. “It will be good to have another heartbeat here,” she says.