“When I wear a uniform, I put it on and take on my nurse self,” Cady Chaplin says. “But you lose your
personal eccentricities, so I like to wear weird T-shirts underneath my scrubs, even if it’s just for myself.”
C
ady Chaplin is an intensive-care nurse at
Lenox Hill Hospital. She just turned thirty.
Her closest friend at work is Karen Cun-
ningham, who is twenty years older and made a
mid-career turn from photography to nursing.
When they met, five years ago, Chaplin and Cun-
ningham hit it off immediately. They live in the
same neighborhood—South Park Slope, in Brook-
lyn—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 cel-
ebrated 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 ne-
cessity behind their masks and face shields, in-
haling their own exhalations, they experience fe-
rocious 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 car-
rying the lucky person rolls by. All too often,
though, the Beatles are interrupted by an an-
nouncement 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 any-
thing else. In those days, no one was “sheltering
in place.” Now every patient, every colleague, every
surface, every friend is a potential threat. Chap-
lin, whose roommate left for the relative safety of
New Jersey weeks ago, comes home to solitude.
“Sometimes, after my shift, I walk in my apart-
ment, 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 inter-
com, it’s hard to get out of that fight-or-flight re-
sponse. I’ve been eating a lot of salted black lico-
rice.” 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 heart-
beat here,” she says.
Many evenings, at seven, Chaplin can hear the
cheering and honking, the nightly tribute to the
“essential workers” who are keeping the city alive.
The sound often makes her tear up with grati-
tude, but she is wary when she hears platitudes
about the “heroic” work of health-care profession-
als. She doesn’t want to be glorified all of a sud-
den. “This is what we trained to do,” she says.
“This is what we do. That was true a year ago,
and it will be true a year from now.”
—David Remnick
