{"id":8032,"date":"2020-04-26T13:08:22","date_gmt":"2020-04-26T19:08:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8032"},"modified":"2020-04-26T13:08:22","modified_gmt":"2020-04-26T19:08:22","slug":"the-nurse-who-came-by-sea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=8032","title":{"rendered":"The Nurse Who Came by Sea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laura Van Staaten<\/a>: <\/p>\n

On Easter Sunday, as the noon sun bore down on New York City in bloom during what is surely its saddest spring in a century, a 50-foot white-hulled sailboat named Turning Point arrived in New York Harbor to berth in an otherwise empty marina in Brooklyn Bridge Park. On deck and ready to throw a line to the waiting dockhands was 26-year-old Rachel Hartley, an ICU nurse who had just sailed the nearly 250 miles from Hampton, Virginia \u2014 keeping watch overnight with her husband, Taylor, over the 34-hour passage \u2014 and ready to make the boat her home for the next two months. She is one of thousands of out-of-town medical professionals answering the call to provide reinforcements to the city\u2019s hospitals.<\/p>\n

Hartley, who has been a nurse since 2015 and spent two years working in an ICU, was working in surgical pre-ops in Lynchburg, Virginia, when, in early March, her hospital began to cancel all but the most urgent surgeries. Then, for several weeks, she said not a day went by when she was not \u201ccalled or emailed or texted by one of the nurse-staffing companies\u201d seeking people with intensive-care experience for coronavirus epicenters like New York: \u201cHoly cow! There was such a need!\u201d<\/p>\n

She thought: \u201cI\u2019m not being utilized and I have training and skills to offer \u2026 [Because] my true bread and butter is critical care.\u201d By then, she had already treated a few COVID-19 patients and her hospital was \u201cbracing for a surge,\u201d but she knew it would be \u201cnothing like New York.\u201d She gave her two weeks notice, and said good-bye to her colleagues. Since she and her husband, Taylor Hartley, a college recruiter and photographer (he took these pictures)<\/a>, owned a boat, they decided they\u2019d sail up to New York in it to give her a place to stay.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Van Staaten: On Easter Sunday, as the noon sun bore down on New York City in bloom during what is surely its saddest spring in a century, a 50-foot white-hulled sailboat named Turning Point arrived in New York Harbor to berth in an otherwise empty marina in Brooklyn Bridge Park. On deck and ready […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8033,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8032\/revisions\/8033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}