BY DEREK TRUMBO #201410, Kentucky

Working as a female nurse in an all-male prison is a trial even under ordinary circumstances. But being the lifeline for the prison’s nearly 1200 inmates during a pandemic is a far different thing. She is no longer the object of their needs and wants. Gone are the whistles and catcalls, sexual innuendos and none-too-thinly veiled promises of a good time as she walks on by. (If only she would feed into their juvenile fantasies and desires.)

Instead, she’s counted among the “outsiders,” one of the possible carriers of a certain doom. A Typhoid Mary to be feared. Contagious. Because getting infected amounted to an ex post facto punishment added onto whatever sentences they’d each been imprisoned for already.

Now, four months into the prison’s lockdown, the nurse no longer has good days and bad days; all she has is her vigil. The truth is that all she can do now is walk the yard and watch for clues, searching for breaches in the prison’s containment. She knows that all of the razor wire and chain-link fences in the world can’t prevent the inevitable. All she can do is try to be as virulent, as pervasive, as the virus. But it’s only a matter of time.

The inmates all react with rancor to the disruption of their daily routine. Prison is all about routines and schedules, both for inmates and the officers alike. In the land of enforced regulation, deviation of any sort is viewed as a punishable offense. Some lifers openly speak of the virus as being their ticket out of here, the early release they’ve sought for a lifetime of torment, trapped behind a fence. Freedom. Other inmates welcome the opportunity for a trip to a real hospital, some good food, and a chance to see the sights. If only they knew what they were really asking for.

The corrections officers scoff at the nurse’s temperature checks and her scrutiny of them upon their arrival at work. They view her precautions as stupid, in place only to make their days all that much longer. She can’t believe that several officers have had the audacity to say they actually wanted the overtime that came with overseeing hospitalized inmates of COVID. A cakewalk? To Hell with the hazards? If only they knew. What cut her the deepest was their ill-advised belief that latex gloves and cloth face masks were all that was needed to keep prisoners, their families, everyone, safe. One officer joked that a healthy dose of COVID would clear up some much needed space in the state’s over-crowded jails and prisons.

Today, all things revolve around the ever present whirlpool of uncertainty. No one has a real clue as to just how deadly COVID could actually be until it strikes. What if the virus mutates? What if it becomes resistant to treatments like MRSA had to antibiotics? What if one of the corrections officers decides to surrender to a fit of cavalier pique and expose everyone because he or she didn’t actually believe the virus was real? Prison was full of those who’d erred in their thinking. What if someone was asymptomatic and the virus somehow slipped in through the cracks?

What if?

Not that she believed herself to be some Florence Nightingale by any means, even though she’d be fighting a coup should the virus actually rear its pernicious head. All that she could do is abide by her oath to do no harm. Even though many of the men she saw on a daily basis were routinely referred to as being inferior, criminal, and subhuman, she had an obligation to care. To treat. To be the difference. Even though the prison where she worked was in no way set up to provide adequate treatment. Even if she’d be putting her own life at risk. All she could do was watch, and pray. Plan for the worst case scenario. She had friends, family, fellow nurses who’d all seen, worked, and ministered to those suffering with COVID. She knew it was real.

She looked around her and saw inmates all sleeping within an arm’s reach of one another. She noticed the wary looks directed her way and thought about her patients. Her duties. What her obligations truly were. A lot was at risk. Lives.

The nurse had, at one time, believed her work to be her calling; it was more than just a job. It was a chance to prove that people really can be different, rather than indifferent. She’d believed that she could both heal and nurture the men she nursed, that she could fix more than just hurts and wounds, that she could potentially fix broken spirits, mend broken people. Now she wasn’t so sure.

Quarantine. She looked at the precautions put in place — an empty wing with a some kind of cover over the gate. It wouldn’t be enough, but it was what she had to work with. Hope. It was all she had.

The nurse’s new status quo, her new norm, was less vocation and more spin doctoring. How could she honestly tell everyone that she could keep them safe? How could she make them all believe that she could keep them well? She couldn’t. All she could do was don the face mask, the cheap plastic shield, the latex gloves, and make her rounds, asking if anyone was experiencing COVID symptoms.

Why that officer’s joke about COVID easing overcrowded prisons stayed with her couldn’t be explained. Lingered like a pesky cough. Perhaps she was coming down with something. But first, she had a job to do.