Two E.R. workers worry: If they died, who’d take care of their son?
NEW YORK — A few nights ago, after their 18-month-old son Nolan went to sleep, Adam Hill and Neena Budhraja sat down on the living room couch in their apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Pen and paper in hand, they turned their attention to a pressing need: figuring out who would be Nolan’s legal guardian if the coronavirus swept them away.
Hill reads a Facebook page for emergency health care workers and sees how everyone is struggling. One couple sent their children to live with relatives. Another doctor has decamped to his basement, where he FaceTimes with his children upstairs. Yet another is living at an airport hotel. Budhraja, who grew up in Woodhaven, Queens, graduated from one of the city’s top public high schools, Brooklyn Technical High School, and then from the City College of New York. Her parents moved to New York from New Delhi in the 1970s just a few years before she was born.
When her shift ends, she tapes her N95 mask to the inside of her locker, and wipes down her face shield and stethoscope with alcohol. She changes out of her scrubs in a bathroom, leaves her sneakers and takes a packed subway or bus home. The trains are uncomfortably crowded these days because of the drastic service cuts since the outbreak began.
Hill’s sleep is terrible. Sometimes, Budhraja moves to the couch in the middle of the night so that she doesn’t wake him. Emergency room staff members are used to seeing their interventions make a difference. Now, she said, “it feels like you are not making any progress.”“But then what — Adam would live in a hotel and I wouldn’t see him for months?” she said. “He wouldn’t see his son for months? To take him away from him, when he comes home looking shellshocked after every shift, it doesn’t feel right. ”
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