She was a family member about to lose a loved one, a scene she has witnessed countless times since she started caring for COVID-19 patients last spring in a Daytona Beach, Fla. hospital where she has worked for seven years.
“Torture” is how she described watching her father’s final breaths. “As a nurse, I want to help people, sit at their bedside. But I couldn’t. It makes you want to break the door down. You want to visit so badly, but you know this virus is so deadly. It was a very crippling feeling to have.”
Her father, Wayne Oney, of Middletown, possibly was infected with the coronavirus while watching his daughter, a student at Kettering Alter High School, play on her junior Olympic volleyball team. One of her teammates tested positive, then she and Oney tested positive.
The girls quickly recovered from their symptoms, but Oney was admitted to Atrium and spent 26 days in ICU. The first 10 days, he wore a mask while oxygen was pumped into his lungs, but when his symptoms worsened, he was placed on a ventilator.
Fairchild was at work in Florida caring for a COVID-19 patient when a nurse at Atrium called to notify her about the need for a ventilator.
“I knew what that meant for us,” she said during a phone interview, noting patients typically don’t survive the virus if they require a ventilator. “It means dying alone without your family by your side.”
She flew home and days later, the family decided to take Oney off life support. Oney, an U.S. Army veteran who served during the Vietnam War and worked as a machinist with Voith Paper Co. for 20 years, died on Nov. 8. He was 69.
Since then, Fairchild, 41, who graduated from Kings High School in 1996, has written about the seriousness of the coronavirus on her Facebook page in hopes of saving one life. Some who have read her post have been critical of her stance, saying COVID-19 isn’t real, a pawn in the recent presidential election.
“It’s not about politics; it’s about humanity,” she told the Journal-News.
On her Facebook page, she wrote: “It’s not a statistic. It’s not a meaningless lockdown to ruin the economy. It’s not a hoax faked to rig an election. It’s a killer.”
Her words were accompanied by a photo she took with her phone. Shot from behind a glass door at Atrium, it shows her father being cared for by nurses.
There is a reflection in the door. It’s Lisa Oney, his wife of 15 years.
“It’s a painful reflection in a piece of glass,” his daughter wrote. “It’s a husband, and a father, and a grandfather, and a friend crossing over without his family surrounding him as he does. It’s nurses holding the cold hands of dying patients over and over again. It’s machines that have been shut off because a virus beat them at their own game. It’s a daughter capturing her father’s last moments on a phone so people can see it in its rawest form. This picture is COVID-19.”
Fairchild said she plans to take a travel assignment in the next two weeks and work with the COVID-19 ICU nurses at Atrium who cared for her father in his final weeks.
Her message to those who haven’t been touched by someone with the coronavirus: “Try to understand that this can happen to anyone. No one is exempt.”
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