Leigh Carter: On the Front Lines

By Charles McGuigan 04.2020

Leigh Carter and millions of other health care workers are working day and night to combat COVID-19, but they are short on supplies. Even in medical facilities that care for our veterans. The film Gallipoli, which came out back in the 1980s, ends with a notorious event that occurred during World War One, the war to end all wars, that didn’t. The allies were trying desperately to gain ground, and the no man’s between them and their Ottoman Empire enemies was sometimes no more than thirty feet wide. West Australians were dug in, and though they did not have any ammunition, they were ordered to charge the Turks with just their fixed bayonets. Minutes later, just as they rose out of the trenches, they were mowed down, three hundred of them, many of them just boys under eighteen years old.

Today, on the front lines, in the trenches, we have millions of soldiers who are running short of ammunition in a war against a virus unlike anything the world has ever seen. Nurses, doctors, orderlies and other healthcare providers are waging battles on thousands of fronts simultaneously. But their supplies are running short, even in federal medical facilities where the population is particularly susceptible to the novel coronavirus.

Leigh Carter is a combat veteran. He served in the first Gulf War as a field radio operator, in reconnaissance, and as a tactical air control party leader. In all, he spent six years in the United States Marine Corps.

These days he is again risking his life daily. Leigh is a registered nurse in the ER at McGuire VA Hospital here in Richmond, Virginia. And things there are not good, because, like elsewhere, the Coronavirus is a threat, and basic medical supplies, specifically personal protective equipment, or PPEs, are in short supply.  

“I can’t tell you the exact numbers because that information is being withheld for different reasons,” Leigh told me. “I know for a fact that we have multiple cases on-site there.”

Due to shortages, some protocols have been altered, at least temporarily. “The policies have been bent because of a lack of PPEs (personal protective equipment), and a lot of the things that we’d been doing that were strict are a lot simpler,” Leigh said. “It’s not the most optimal conditions to be treating patients, let alone keeping us safe.”

Chief among the very basic protective gear that these men and women in the healthcare professions need are N95 respirator masks. These are designed as single use facemasks. But healthcare workers are using them multiple times.

“I have one that I used for four straight days,” Leigh told me. ”The fourth day I had it on, it was still moist when I came back the next morning, clearly degraded”

The scarcity of these very basic safeguards is so intense that Leigh’s boss kept them under lock and key.

“The nurse manager is locking up these thing in her room, in her office,” said Leigh. “She’s doing a great job, doing the best she can to stretch the PPE out because we are limited if not on the brink of not having any.”  

Amid this epidemic, Leigh has seen his fair share of outright lies and misinformation spread like another sort of virus on the internet.  

“The multiple posts I’m seeing on social media of misinformation being spread around does everyone a disservice,” Leigh said. “When you tout your knowledge that’s ill-informed, you do yourself and everybody else a disservice, and you’re just prolonging this process.”

Leigh sometimes gets tired of hearing people complain about having to be pent up in their own home, and he does not understand, contrary to what science tells us, that there are still people who insist on gathering in large groups. He’d like to remind everyone that not all of us are fortunate enough to be holed up in a safe home, insulated from this hideous pathogen.

“My ex-wife is a nurse at Chippenham, and I have a four-year old daughter,” he said. “We share custody and we’re going through this every day so the posts that we hear about how horrible it is that you’re imprisoned. Think about that. Think about what we’re doing every day. I have two twelve-hour shifts starting tomorrow. Meanwhile, people are complaining about having to stay at home. So, just try to take pause and think about those people that are consistently out doing that and we’re all suffering this together.”