Reporters and editors on the International, National and Science desks have been working around the clock to cover the news about Ebola. When the story came to New York, Anemona Hartocollis, the Metro health reporter, was called on to cover a new angle: the stigma facing health workers at Bellevue Hospital Center.
It was a remark by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Sunday that got us thinking about the psychological stress that people at Bellevue Hospital Center might be feeling as they took care of New York’s first Ebola patient.
In a “media availability” at the hospital Sunday, the mayor chastised his fellow citizens for mistreating Bellevue workers, especially the nurses, out of fear that they would spread Ebola. “This is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.
After working many days without a break (including the previous weekend, on an article about how a new state law has barred 34,500 mental patients from having guns), I managed to beg off duty Sunday and was at the movies. But a senior editor heard the mayor’s talk and was intrigued.
The Ebola story in New York has been a tough one from the beginning because, as reporters, we have been very dependent on official sources like the health department, the mayor’s office, the police and emergency services. These sources are wonderful at feeding the news beast the basic information, but often they do not go much beyond that. And obviously, they have a strong interest in protecting their own reputations and not releasing anything negative. So Mr. de Blasio’s public admission that Bellevue workers were feeling stigmatized was jarring.
Mr. de Blasio spoke only in generalities about how the workers were being mistreated. My assignment was to get workers to talk and to find specific cases that we could document. My first move was to search my Google contacts for the word “Bellevue.” Up popped random names and numbers I had saved from other Bellevue stories, like Hurricane Sandy, which had forced the hospital to evacuate. It did not take long to find that, as I expected, Bellevue workers had been warned by the public relations department not to talk to the press.
Nonetheless, over two days, I continued working my sources. At the same time, my editor sent two intrepid stringers to buttonhole Bellevue workers outside the hospital and at nearby subway stops. Sometimes you get the story just by pounding the pavement. At 8 p.m. one night, I hopped on my bike and rode through the dark Manhattan streets to one nurse’s apartment to knock on her door. Not that I didn’t try to talk myself out of it. It was late, and I was tired. Before going, I did a Google Maps search and saw that it was only a 16-minute ride from the office, not enough time to complain about. Then I called my husband, thinking he might tell me the kids really needed me at home, but he declined to get involved. Then I thought of my editor, and how I would explain to him that I had gone home instead of the extra mile. So I was stuck. I went.
By the second day, we had enough of what the editors wanted – specific, reliable information – to feel confident in writing the story. Nurses and other employees talked about their own perhaps irrational but understandable fears of passing the virus to their families, despite their protective gear and sanitizing showers. They talked about being shunned by friends and acquaintances who knew where they worked.
Eventually, I got an email from Bellevue saying officials there thought the stigma faced by health care workers was important to talk about. Dr. Nate Link, Bellevue’s medical director, took time out of an incredibly stressful day – including one more visit from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – to walk me through the Ebola protocol at Bellevue and try to make it clear to the layman. He confirmed the problem of worker stigma, again in general terms.
In the end, the story came to life through its details, like how Mayra Martinez, a personal care associate at Bellevue, was told by her longtime hairdresser to find another beautician. One of the stringers, Nate Schweber, was at the subway at dawn and encountered Ms. Martinez as she walked out in her scrubs. She had just overheard two passengers joking about Ebola on the train, and she was primed to confide in someone. In the end, old-fashioned leg work paid off for all of us.