‘Don’t Call Me a Hero’
Michelle Gonzalez doesn’t want you to call her a hero.
Gonzalez, 30, is a registered nurse at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. She’s also a member of the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) executive committee and the Democratic Socialists of America. At the hospital where she works, there’s still not enough protective equipment (PPE) – and she and the other nurses know that “a second wave will come, no matter what.” Gonzales herself contracted COVID-19 back in March and returned to the job shortly thereafter.
We spoke in June about the politics of the crisis, why she thinks calling nurses heroes benefits the people who put them in danger, and how being a nurse in the Bronx made her a socialist. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
The work and the speedup
Normally, I’ve worked 12-hour shifts, three days a week. Some people say oh, three days a week, wow. But they don’t understand it turns into 38, 39 hours, a whole work week in three days. It’s something you get used to after a year, but it’s a physically laborious job. You need days off to rest and decompress.
[In late March, I remember I went in] and they told me to go to a different floor. They had made it into an ICU overnight, which means nothing was set up, there was no machinery that we put on a patient to monitor them. We’d have to put on extra PPE, go into the room, go out, check [the computers]. So [I was] taking two minutes to put the boot covers on, gown, helmet. Then [I’d realize I] forgot to put my mask on and have to take the damn helmet off. We were all so stressed and overwhelmed.
By the end of the day, we couldn’t keep track of how many patients we had, so we were just taking care of whoever was beeping. That day, I could feel my body telling me things like, “I’m short of breath. Sit down.” And I’m starting to get dizzy and seeing stars. I said to myself, “You’re being paranoid. It’s the mask. You’re probably not getting enough oxygen.” I sat down. I took a second. I got back up. It happened again another couple hours later.
Sick with COVID
I was sick for days. My whole household got sick. I live with my parents and brother, and my grandmother stays with us most of the week. So we had to kick her out the first time someone had a fever in late March.
My father works for New York City transit, and he almost died from COVID. I‘ll never forget this. I brought my parents to where I work and not only begged the emergency room but ran upstairs to my own unit and begged my manager for someone to test him, and I remember being told that my dad wasn’t exhibiting enough symptoms. They told us that we could wait three hours outside in the [overflow] tent with people coughing.
My father was short of breath, and I thought, if he doesn’t have it he’s going to get it in there. So we reached out to a family doctor who saved him. But my father would have been sent home to die. He already had pneumonia.
The desperate self-taught science of masks
I think I got sick with COVID in March because I’d been using [the same] mask for a week. The hospital administrators would tell you to wipe it down but that breaks down the first degree of protection on the mask. Or they’d give you Lysol - but as soon as you do something to the polyurethane layer, you denigrate the layer. N95 only works if that layer is there.
I was on a call with a group of California nurses, telling them about [cleaning the mask], and all of a sudden on Zoom I start seeing the California nurses going, “No, no, no!” Eventually one of the nurses unmuted himself and said, “When you get rid of that layer, it becomes like an English muffin – more things can grow in there.” I then just started [taking] it on and off, not disinfecting and praying, which obviously didn’t work because I got [COVID] maybe two weeks later.
Our trauma, their profit
Every facility in the country received federal funds for the pandemic from the CARES Act. The act provided $660 million to my hospital. ICU nurses who were used to taking care of two patients were taking care of four. It was an absolute mess. It was disorganized. It was disrespectful at a time when nurses were caring for up to four ICU patients, whether they had the training or not. We have questions about that $660 million.
My CEO makes $13 million. [He received this amount in 2018.] The guy below him probably makes another few million. They threw us a recognition bonus of $2,500. It took weeks to get this recognition pay, and it got so heavily taxed that $2,500 turned into $1,063. For that I was like, keep the money and get us some help.
The Bronx was especially hard hit
This was a very clear-cut example of classism. In the Bronx, unfortunately, we have a lot of poverty in my neighborhood, and, if you look at statistics prior to COVID, we had high rates of diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disorders. All these things hurt this population's ability to fight COVID.
New York State Nurses Association, for a long time, has fought to improve the care that the institution is providing these patients. Many of these disorders are preventable if we have the resources.
About 60% of what the hospital gets is Medicaid or Medicare. The money is coming from the state social services, and that funding keeps getting cut. Governor Cuomo, in the middle of a pandemic, cut that budget. When you think about where we were prior to the pandemic, and now we’re cutting funding, it almost feels like you want us all to die here.
My beautiful Bronx is why I’m a socialist. I love this place. I’ve had the opportunity to leave, but I don’t want to leave it worse than when I got it. I want to build here, and I don’t see a way of building in a capitalist way in the Bronx. My community has suffered from redlining, from the problems we’ve had since the 1970s.
I’m also a socialist, because I don’t believe our current framework in health care will address my patients’ needs. I think health care is meant to be equal for every single person, regardless of income or education. Everything is so geared to profit, you’ve neglected the patients.
Hero narratives kill
We were losing our minds with the trauma of knowing that we tried to care for patients, and most people had a patient die every shift. One nurse told me she had looked outside – ‘like an idiot, Michelle!’ – and she could see the bodies lined up for the truck like they were going to a party. She wasn’t well after that. She told me she had a dream where she walked through the park and bodies started coming out of the ground.
Once the hospitals heard “heroes,” they latched onto that narrative … but what happens when we die of COVID? Everyone can say, “Look at the hero! The hero died doing something important. The hero chose to go into the burning building to save the COVID patient!”
No, I didn't! I signed up to come into work and to help people get better, help them understand their health, help elevate people. You don’t assume you’re going to be running around confronting your own mortality because you don’t have the right equipment.
I feel like a science experiment
I feel like I’m a science experiment because I have COVID living inside me. You know the scene in Alien when everyone is chilling and celebrating like, “yeah, we killed him!” And then all of a sudden the guy starts making noises and the alien pops out? I say I had [COVID] and watch people back up. It’s a fear in your life that I never get over.
Remember 9/11 when the firefighters rushed in and then got cancer? I worry about that with COVID. I have asthma, and I didn’t have it six months ago. I had it as a kid and have had it on occasion since, but now I have it regularly.
I know what I went through, I know that I’m traumatized because we didn’t have the equipment we needed. Overnight, nurses had to become Intensive Care Unit (ICU) nurses. People don’t realize the training it takes to prepare an ICU-level nurse. I have a lot of fears about the second wave regarding supplies and staffing.
Fighting for a better future
There aren’t enough working-class people in the community who have energy to do this [waging labor and political battles for more resources and respect], because they’ve been so beaten down by the system they don’t believe that change is possible. I refuse to accept that this is what happens when you’re Black or Brown in America – I have to believe change is possible for the next generation, if not mine.
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