One night in late March 2020, just a month into the pandemic, Simone Hannah-Clark, a nurse in the COVID ICU at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, came home from work and began to write an essay describing everything she’d done that day.
It had not been an easy one. She’d started with sadness: A patient had died overnight, and she had to help cover the body. Then she tried to figure out the logistics of doubling the capacity of the ICU by fitting two beds, two monitors, and two ventilators into each room; admitted three more patients, a process complicated by COVID precautions; searched for missing equipment; and, with the help of her colleagues, plus plenty of coffee and some dark humor, handled a hundred more small crises. She stayed an hour and a half past the end of her 13-hour shift and left reluctantly — there was still more to do.
“Doctors may be the architects of what happens in the hospital,” she wrote. “But we [the nurses] are the builders. And so we build, even amid chaos and disintegration.”
She sent the essay to a friend, who was moved to tears and passed it on to another friend who worked at The New York Times. In early April, the piece appeared on the Times’ op-ed page, under the headline “An I.C.U. Nurse’s Coronavirus Diary.”
Simone wasn’t looking to become famous or be a spokeswoman for all nurses. During the early weeks of COVID, she’d been getting a lot of texts and calls from family and friends who had heard the ambulance sirens and participated in the daily cheers for doctors, nurses, and other essential workers but had no idea what actually went on inside the hospital, so she decided to write it all down. “Nobody knows what we’re doing,” she says now, “all the advanced assessments that are going on in your head while you’re doing a simple task like placing an IV or washing a patient. A lot of what we do is unseen.”
This month Simone is back in the spotlight as one of the subjects of GE HealthCare’s Canvases of Care project for Nurses Week. New York–based artist Tim Okamura has created paintings of Simone and four other nurses. Each painting will contain one brushstroke for every hour of care the nurses have put in over the course of their careers — Simone’s has 42,016 strokes — and the paintings will remain unfinished, because a nurse’s work is never done. On Friday, May 12, Simone’s portrait is being displayed in Times Square for one minute of every hour, all day long.
Growing up in New Zealand, Simone didn’t intend to become a nurse. But when she was a teenager, her father developed myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood disorder, and she spent a lot of time watching nurses take care of him in the hospital and later in hospice. He died when she was 17. Afterward, she went to university to study English. Then one day her roommate announced that she had decided to go to nursing school. “A lightbulb went on in my head,” Simone remembers, “and I said, ‘That’s what I should be doing.’”
Between her graduation from nursing school in 2002 and the beginning of her new grad year in Melbourne, Australia, Simone spent three months in New York, where she met her future husband. Back in Melbourne, she fell in love again, this time with working in the ICU. Eventually she made her way back to New York and began working in the Mount Sinai ICU in 2005. By the time the pandemic came around, she was an old hand.
“Everyone was like, ‘You poor thing,’” she says of those early pandemic days, “and I would say, ‘It’s a bit crazy, sure, and a little scary, but it’s not that different from what we usually do, apart from the PPE [personal protective equipment].’ This is what I was trained for. I had skills that were uniquely suited to what was needed during the pandemic.”
In September 2020, Simone went back to school to become a nurse practitioner, but she continued to work in the ICU. Earlier this spring, she started a new position working with a doctor in pulmonary medicine. She divides her time between seeing patients in the clinic and doing follow-up from home. “Patients need a lot of care,” she says. “I’m constantly on the phone with all sorts of issues, from ‘I lost my oxygen tank’ to ‘I can’t pay.’ I like problem-solving. There’s never a dull moment.”
Although telemedicine is an option now, Simone still prefers to see her patients in person. “There’s nothing like being able to place your hands on them and use your eyes and hands and nursing skills to assist,” she says. “Unless there’s some technology that allows us to touch someone through a computer.”
But she firmly believes that even the best and latest technology is insignificant without staff that knows how to relate to patients. “People keep trying to remove the humanity from nursing,” she says. “Things always kind of break down when we do that.”
Simone is pleased by the recognition from Canvases of Care, though at first she thought the email from GE HealthCare wasn’t intended for her. “A nurse is always in the background,” she says. “Most of what we do is unseen. It’s fitting that everybody is a little apprehensive about being in the spotlight.” She pauses. “It’s a potent combination of being from New Zealand, where we’re very self-deprecating, and being a nurse and female. I’m working on it.”
