BEN ROBERTS: Photograph encapsulates Phoebe’s battle with COVID

I’ll never forget it. It’s an image that — more than anything else I saw in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — encapsulates the heartbreaking reality of what our community and the Phoebe Family endured.

I took the picture on an April evening in 2020, standing outside the room of a dying COVID patient in a critical care unit filled with other COVID patients struggling to survive. It captured the gloved hands of a nurse, gently clasping the frail hand of a woman and holding it tightly against her gowned body right next to her heart, as the woman took her final breaths.

I was in that place at that time to document Phoebe’s efforts to use iPads to allow families to communicate with or say their final goodbyes to hospitalized loved ones they could not visit in person. About 20 minutes earlier, the woman’s husband, who was beginning to recover from COVID in another unit in the hospital, had been informed of his wife’s critical condition. The chaplaincy team was on the way to the woman’s room to facilitate a Facetime call with her children when her heart stopped.

Immediately, members of the critical care team from throughout the unit ran to her bedside, frantically donning the proper personal protective equipment before rushing into her room. They began chest compressions which, to a person like me unaccustomed to such a scene, seemed a jarring way to save someone’s life. They feverishly administered medication to restart her heart and get her breathing. While they were able to regain a faint pulse, it seemed clear the woman would not survive, and her children made the difficult decision to request that resuscitation efforts be stopped.

Then, we waited. We waited for the medications to wear off. We waited for her heart to stop again. We waited for the last breath to leave her body. We waited for her earthly life to end.

The nurse who held the patient’s hand brought her own cellphone into the room and began playing gospel music she knew her patient loved. Another nurse gently touched the woman’s face and stroked her hair. When she passed away peacefully, she was not alone. She was — quite literally — in the hands of caregivers who, despite witnessing unimaginable suffering and death in the previous weeks, managed to fill that hospital room — that had been so chaotic just moments earlier — with a loving and compassionate calmness I had never seen before.

Not long after I began my first career as a television journalist, I had the privilege of helping lead WALB’s coverage of the Flood of 1994. I knew then that, no matter how long or where I worked as a news anchor, I would never be part of any news coverage that would be more important or impactful to the community I served. COVID-19 brought that feeling back. I don’t know how many more years I’ll work in health care communications, but I know nothing will replicate being part of the Phoebe Family’s incredible and impassioned response to becoming one of the world’s worst COVID hotspots.

I will never argue that Phoebe is a perfect organization, but I know we are fortunate to have a health system with Phoebe’s depth of talent and breadth of services in a city the size of Albany. We are even more fortunate that the hospital is operated locally by people who live in and care about this community. No one answers to shareholders looking to boost profits or to executives in Atlanta or Charlotte or Dallas who may not be willing to approve the resources necessary to provide the care and services the people of our region deserve.

Every decision made during the pandemic has been made by people who truly care about this community and have the best interests of Phoebe’s patients and staff at heart.

I know the Phoebe Family is filled with dedicated, determined, compassionate people who want to help and heal and make every life they touch, better. If you ever doubt that, think about the image from that April evening. Remember how so many families suffered.

Remember how our heroic caregivers responded. Remember how we joined hands and made it through, together.