Editor’s note: The nurse in this story has the same name as the reporter. They are not the same person.

Like most in health care, Jessica Barnett joined the medical field to help people. When it became clear more help was needed to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, she didn’t hesitate to leave her job as a registered nurse in the South and travel north.

It’s been two weeks since the 25-year-old arrived in the Big Apple. Through Aya Healthcare, a travel nursing agency, she’s been able to join the front-line workers at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, a borough of New York City.

“We’re much busier,” Barnett said of the difference between St. Barnabas and the hospitals she worked at in Alabama and Georgia. “Everything’s crazy. I’m wearing the full getup all day long, every day.”

That “full getup” includes a surgical gown, face mask, gloves, medical goggles to cover her eyes, hair cover and shoe covers. When Barnett started, she worked in an area designated specifically for patients with COVID-19. She said now it changes from day to day, and she’s been spending more time working in the emergency room.

She said being there “just seems like the right thing to do,” but it’s not easy. In fact, she admitted, there are times when “it’s pretty terrible.”

“The news stories you see of refrigerated trucks — they’re real,” Barnett said. “There’s no visitors for these patients, so they’re going through this alone with us. They have nurses and doctors, but they don’t have their families.”

She said of the patients she’s cared for and lost, those are the ones that affect her most.

“The ones that have passed without families, and you’re the one there when the doctor decides we’re done resuscitating,” Barnett said. “You’re the one holding their hands.”

It makes it that much more meaningful when she talks to her own family, most of whom still live in Limestone County. She said her boyfriend, who is also pursuing a career in medicine, and her mother have been supportive of her decision to go from the moment she announced it, and they continue to video call and talk every day.

“Everyone has been supportive and sending me well wishes from a thousand miles away,” Barnett said.

She’s also received support locally. She said they don’t have evening applause breaks in her area, but she has seen residents holding up signs of thanks for health care workers.

She also gets to interact with people from a variety of backgrounds. Barnett, an Ardmore graduate who grew up in West Limestone, said it’s one of the things she appreciates the most about her experience as a travel nurse in New York.

“I’ve gotten to meet a ton of different people from different cultures,” she said. “It’s primarily Jamaican, so getting to talk to them and … getting to meet different doctors and the way they do things. The way they do patient care (in New York) is a little bit different than back home.”

She said the emergency room at St. Barnabas has been particularly crowded lately because the pandemic’s effects on outpatient clinics and mental health facilities. As a result, Barnett said they have seen an increase in psychiatric patients who don’t have access to their medication and patients who normally would have received care at an outpatient clinic but now must visit the ER.

Barnett looks forward to a decrease in active cases of COVID-19. She joined other health care workers and experts in encouraging social distancing, practicing good hygiene and protecting themselves to reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus. Even in Limestone County, where numbers have remained remarkably low and the population is nowhere near the size of New York City, there are still people for whom the disease poses a major threat, she said.

“There’s not the volume of people there that it could hit, but I know in Athens and Limestone County, there’s a lot of elderly patients and elderly people,” Barnett said. “It’s an older town, so those are the people we have to protect. It’s not so much about people our age.”

Barnett signed a 13-week contract when she accepted the offer to work in New York. It’s her first assignment as a travel nurse, and she’s already talking about where she might go next.

“My agent has already mentioned positions in California and Washington,” she said. “It’ll be interesting to see how they do things on the west coast.”

In the meantime, she encourages other nurses and nursing students to give travel nursing a try.

“If you’re in the right place to do it, do it,” Barnett said. “Science is evolving. Nursing is always evolving. I love my hometown and staying around the people you know in your community, but it’s always good to see how different things are done. It opens your eyes to the rest of the world.”