Courtesy UMMC Communications
Jasmine Watson is a registered nurse at the University of Mississippi Medical Center’s 2 North unit, which is consumed entirely with COVID-19 patients. The immense stress of the pandemic is a constant pressure on Watson and her colleagues.
’We Have Forgotten Who We Are’:
December 9 - 22, 2020 • jfp.ms
Denial and Death in Mississippi Hospitals
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J
asmine Watson recalls bringing her patients perfume. It is an odd memory, out of place juxtaposed against other scenes in her medical-surgical unit. “They want that sense of normalcy,” she says, laughing warmly as she remembers. Perfumes and colognes, to fill in what is left of her patients’ sense of smell with a taste of home, rather than the cloying scent of the hospital. Perfume is common; so is fruit. Apples and bananas, anything bright and fresh to keep their spirits up. Some of the objects she carries up to her floor are utilitarian—phones and chargers,
by Nick Judin devices to distract, to keep in touch. She shepherds them from families outside the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where she works as a registered nurse, to her patients in a unit that coronavirus has swallowed completely. All of her charges are afflicted with it. In the beginning, she told the Jackson Free Press in an interview, each nurse dealt with one COVID-19 patient. At this point, each of them is managing three. Their systemic symptoms make treatment significantly more taxing than typical cases. “They’re still med-surg patients. But on top of that, they have COVID,” Watson says.
Her charges are cocooned in technology, telemetry and pulse monitors to watch for a dangerous turn. Watson knows how quickly the disease can claim a life. She has seen it firsthand. She has a patient in mind. The law bars her from sharing fine detail, so the portrait is a silhouette. The patient was young, healthy, the kind for whom a hospitalization should have been a brief detour on the road to recovery. She left for the weekend, expecting her patient to be ready to discharge when she returned. When she did, her patient was gone. That person’s memory is still with
Watson. But it carries less currency outside the boundaries of the hospital, where she finds herself surrounded by deniers not even willing to wear a mask. “People feel like you’re telling them what to do,” she said. “But we just don’t want you laying in the hospital bed unable to breathe.” Time and the worsening crisis have worn the nurse’s patience away. The last squabble she had was in the grocery store in line with someone looming behind her without a mask on. “I’m not really nice about it. I yelled ‘COVID is real! Can we get a few feet behind me?’” Paradoxically, the pushback against public health has only seemed to worsen
