Chapter 2 #2
“So your job is to prepare for the worst,” Adelaide prompts.
“Yes,” I say, nodding.
“What makes you different from a doomsday prepper?”
I laugh. “For one, I don’t stockpile weapons.”
Soo--Yun, watching from the sidelines, turns to the producer. “We’ll have to cut that,” she says.
“Can you walk us through a typical day?” Adelaide asks.
“There is no typical day,” I reply. “That’s why I love this job.”
God. Could I sound any more clichéd? Although I usually don’t sweat speaking in front of a crowd, this is not bringing out my best. I wish for Jesse’s effortless charm, which he swears is just the by--product of giving zero fucks.
“We have several programs in Emergency Preparedness, and my team works daily on each of them. There’s emergency medical distribution—-pills, vaccines, whatever.
Training exercises. Healthcare system preparedness, in tandem with hospital, nursing home, and assisted living partners.
Community initiatives—-working with local partners.
We also manage the Rhode Island special needs emergency registry, which tracks people who might need assistance during an emergency because of a disability.
And we do volunteer management, as well as oversee the state’s field hospital assets. ”
I can see Adelaide’s smile getting tighter and tighter as I speak. Somehow I’ve managed to make a dynamic job sound as boring as watching paint dry.
“We spend our days preparing for what might happen until we are interrupted by an actual emergency, and then we shift into action. So we may be doing grant work when someone calls and says that a pipe burst at Hasbro Children’s Hospital.
We may be doing a storm risk assessment, but that falls to the wayside when mpox breaks out.
” I shrug. “My job is to make sure that if a potential disaster turns into a real one, you’re going to be safe. ”
Adelaide crosses her legs. “Yet you haven’t been chief here for very long,” she says. “How did that come about?”
Everyone remembers where they were the morning of 9/11, and also where they were the week of March 2020, when the world shut down because of Covid.
I’d been in my job for all of two months, and I was still learning when suddenly we were in the middle of the biggest emergency most of us had faced in our lifetimes.
My boss at the time appointed me Healthcare Coalition Coordinator the day before I turned twenty--one.
By April, our department was meeting remotely on Zoom along with the rest of the world.
As the hospitals got overrun with Covid patients, medical equipment became an issue.
We were watching the news from Italy—-which had been hit so hard and so fast. My department had modeled our needs based on that: thousands of ventilators, when we had only hundreds.
One morning I was at my kitchen table on a Zoom meeting when I realized my socks were wet.
I glanced down and saw a pool of water under the kitchen sink cabinet, rapidly spreading.
I turned off my camera and grabbed every dish towel I could find, throwing it into the puddle to absorb the mess.
I’d deal with the problem after the meeting ended.
When I turned my camera back on, everyone was arguing about running out of vents.
“Can you turn a car into a ventilator?” someone asked. “What about a vacuum cleaner?”
“What about the midlevel vents we use in the field?” my boss suggested.
“Can you make a CPAP or BiPAP into one?”
“How about doctoring an anesthesia machine —-”
The head of public health held up her hand. “We don’t have time for any of that,” she said flatly.
Everyone fell silent. Finally, my boss cleared his throat. “We are going to have to teach hospitals how to triage who gets a vent, and who doesn’t.”
His words escalated into an ethical debate: Do you prioritize someone younger, rather than older—-even though the elderly were often the most severe cases?
Do you rule out anyone with a preexisting condition or give them preference?
Do you say that a person can only be on a vent for a certain number of days .
. . and if recovery doesn’t occur by then, they have to be disconnected?
I had known, at Columbia, that public health sometimes comes down to this: sacrificing individuals for the greater good. But I hadn’t known how viscerally I’d react to being complicit in those choices.
When the Zoom ended, I wiggled into the tiny space beneath the sink to figure out the problem. The leak seemed to be coming from a spot where the water line split into two separate pipes.
My gaze narrowed on the Y--shaped connector. I sat up so fast I banged my head.
A couple summers before, I’d dated a guy who went to the University of Rhode Island. He’d worked with a professor who ran the school’s 3--D printing lab. Now, I pulled up his contact information, and texted him. Within an hour, he was introducing me to Professor Walker over email.
Two hours later, I was on the phone with the state’s head of public health.
“The professor can design a Y splitter for us, but he has to have the tubing to make sure it will work,” I told her.
“A Y splitter?” she asked.
“It’s like a wishbone,” I told her, using Walker’s exact words. “It would use a single ventilator but direct the flow of oxygen to two patients instead of just one.”
“That’s risky,” she said. “You’d have to have similar size patients, and even then, their lung capacities might be totally different—-”
“I understand,” I interrupted. “But if an ER is slammed, wouldn’t it be better to try this before denying someone a ventilator completely?”
It took Professor Walker a week to design a splitter after I hand--delivered the tubing circuit he needed to his house.
I left it, as per his instructions, in the mailbox—-his wife was immunocompromised and he was being extra cautious about social distancing.
He said that when he was finished, his brother--in--law, who worked for the police department, would bring it by my apartment.
When I went downstairs to meet him, a tall man was leaning against the brick facade.
He was in plain clothes, with a badge clipped to his belt, and I realized he must have been a detective instead of a street cop.
He held a canvas bag printed with the logo of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and stood there scrolling on his phone.
“Jesse?” I said tentatively.
He was masked, like me, so I couldn’t see anything but his eyes.
They were an unearthly blue that I’d only seen once—-on vacation as a kid, in Puerto Rico, in a bioluminescent bay.
We kayaked through it in the black of night, and every time my oar dipped, the water lit up with blooms of aqua and peacock.
When I swiped my hand through the water, the light slipped between my fingers.
“I’m Molly Ambrose,” I said.
His brows drew together. “You’re not what I expected.”
I felt a little frisson of annoyance. I may have been the youngest person in my department, but I was also the only one who had found a potential solution to a devastating resource shortage.
He thrust the canvas bag toward me. We were careful not to touch.
“I’m supposed to tell you that there are three different prototypes in there, so you can figure out what works best. And that Gary also made a filter that slows down the release of Covid molecules when the patient exhales.
And . . .” His voice drifted off, and he picked up his phone again, reading from it verbatim.
“And there are other ports for oxygen and exhalation and a one--way valve.”
I nodded. “Thank you. And thank Gary again for me.”
“I can run that to the hospital for you, if you like. So you don’t have to worry about decontaminating when you go home to your family after delivering it.”
“I’ve got it covered.” I smiled, though I knew he would not see it under my mask. “Plus, I live alone.”
Jesse tilted his head. “Good to know,” he said.
Jesse: Hi, it’s Jesse.
Jesse: Fitzgerald.
Molly: I know.
Jesse: Just wondering how the splitter worked out?
Molly: Third one was a charm.
Jesse: Glad to hear it.
Molly: Not sure we’ll need them but knowing that we have these is helping everyone sleep at night.
Jesse: Not everyone.
Jesse:
Jesse: I don’t know what the lower half of your face looks like. It’s keeping me up.
Molly: Nose. Lips. The usual.
Jesse: But you could have no teeth. Or a mustache. Who’s to say.
Molly: I do not have a mustache.
Jesse: Prove it.
Molly: (sends a photo of her face)
Jesse: Could be a deep fake. Would need to verify.
Molly: !!
Jesse: Memorial Park. Noon, tomorrow.
Jesse brought a Covid--safe picnic lunch to Memorial Park: two shopping bags, each outfitted with a towel to sit on, an Italian sub from a deli, a bag of chips, and a bottle of water.
We sat six feet apart. He had taken his mask off first, and the missing pieces of his face fell together—-the square jaw with a faint shadow of stubble, the quirk of his mouth.
When I took my mask off, he grinned. “I see you shaved,” he said.
I threw the cap of my water bottle at him.
“You’re a detective,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be detecting?”
“You’re in emergency preparedness. Shouldn’t you be preparing?”
“Well,” I replied, “since we’re in the thick of an emergency, we’re just trying to get through each day.”
Jesse leaned back on the grass. “Look at that. We already have so much in common.”
“I highly doubt that. You don’t know anything about me.”
He smiled, and a dimple popped in his cheek. He proceeded to weaponize it through much of our conversation.
“It seems like,” he said, “you don’t want to be here.” He gestured to my wrist. “You keep looking at your watch.”
He was right. I usually ate lunch while answering emails. Even an hour spent in a park on a beautiful summer day felt like a luxury I could not afford.
“No,” I assured him. “Honestly, this is nice.”