MANHATTAN, N.Y. — It didn’t take too long for Megan Olson and Jill Borowicz to decide to leave for New York City when the COVID-19 pandemic swarmed into the country’s largest city.
“It was like, ‘OK, we finished Tiger King (on Netflix). Now what?'”Olson said.
The two owners of Lux Life MedSpa in Mansfield, closed their office and left for Manhattan at the end of March.
They are trained in the medical field as nurse practitioners. And, after hearing New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pleas for nurses to aid hospitals, they couldn’t stay away.
“We’ve done family practice and Jill has worked in the emergency room,” Olson said. “When the governor’s orders came, we shut our doors and decided to come to New York.
“If I were a nurse who was struggling, and there was a nurse who had the time and resources, I would really hope she would come help me. Honestly that is what it was at the the end of the day,” Olson said.
“We knew we had to be there.”
The two are living in an apartment with a stipend from IYA Health, the organization which is working to place the nurses in hospitals.
Olson is waiting for an assignment to a field hospital in Queens or the Bronx. Borowicz is working at JFK Medical Center in New Jersey.
“When I got to hospital, every bed was full. There were people with COVID-19 out in the hall ways. Staff members had caught it. This is very serious,” said Borowicz, who has eight years of nursing experience. “I’ve seen more deaths here than in my entire career.”
Borowicz added that she doesn’t regret coming and all the doctors in the hospital have been very grateful to everyone who has come to help.
The two have been living in a lower Manhattan neighborhood since March 30, utilizing a housing stipend through the hospitals.
“It’s eerie,” Olson said. “I can hear my own footsteps when I walk on Broadway.”
The New York Times reported Wednesday that New York State has recorded more than 200,000 confirmed cases of the virus, and over 10,000 deaths.
“We are very lucky in Ohio,” Olson said. “In a city of millions of people, you don’t have that luxury of containment. In Ohio everything is so spread out. In Ohio, our governor listened. People rallied. And it stopped (spreading.)
“Here it’s quiet. I don’t want to get into any gory details, but it is as bad as they are saying it is,” Olson said. “These nurses and doctors are having to make really tough decisions. It’s kind of like a war zone (in hospitals).”
