First Words

Letter from the Editor

On Looking for the Light

In mid-April, I got a much-needed wake-up call from Nick Hallett ’18.

Then nearly six weeks into New York’s stay-at-home order, I had begun to associate the COVID-19 pandemic with docuseries on Netflix, working from home in pajamas, and the endless struggle to entertain my wild child three-year-old.

But after my hours-long interview with Nick, an ICU nurse outside New York City, I emerged from our guest bedroom (my “office”) looking so stricken and teary-eyed that my husband gasped.

Nick, a 2018 nursing grad, had just quit his job as a cardiac nurse at Upstate Medical Center in Syracuse to join the COVID response at a hospital downstate. In his six weeks on the job, Hallett had been working in a makeshift ICU, one of nine such units in the crowded COVID-only hospital, including one in the former cafeteria.

Nick told me, in grim and vivid detail, about the heartbreaking calculation nurses were making each time a patient coded, since performing chest compressions exponentially increased the risk of virus transmission. The FaceTime calls he’d had to make to a dying patient’s loved ones—the only safe way for them to say goodbye. The warning he’d give to grieving families before he turned the phone on his patient. How the image of their swollen, barely recognizable father or sister or spouse prone in a hospital bed might never leave their memories.

“Are you sure you want to see this?” he’d ask.

Like nothing I’d read or seen on the news, Nick’s stories made it clear: the virus was unpredictable, unprecedented, and utterly devastating.

Cocooned in my lazy quarantine bubble with my family, it was just the reality check I needed.

But more shocking than the details Nick shared was his ability to stay positive through it all. As we talked on his day off, Nick laughed with me about the “dumb stuff” he was watching on Netflix. And sardonically, the Facebook posts we’d both seen loudly declaring the virus a “hoax.”

Perhaps it’s a quality inherent to the nursing profession—the tendency to see the good in the darkest of crises.

“We are discharging patients,” he emphasized. “People are getting better.”

In this issue, in some small way, I hope you’ll find that same balance of stark reality and positivity through stories of UC students and alumni on the literal front lines of the pandemic, the inspiring Class of 2020, and alumni turning the struggle for racial justice into action—all who are finding the light in this dark time.

As always, I’d love to hear how you’re doing and what you think of this issue. Email me at uticamag@utica.edu

Mary Donofrio, Editor