When the coronavirus crisis swept into New York City, Bency Mathew had a big problem on her hands.
As the director of nursing services for inpatient programs at St. Mary’s Hospital for Children in Bayside, Queens, Mathew is in charge of some of the Big Apple’s most critically ill and medically fragile kids.
“Exposure to any sort of infectious process will become very much detrimental for them,” Mathew, 37, told The Post.
“There is no time where we can miss a beat.”
The hospital, an acute care facility for about 124 children, cares for a wide spectrum of young patients, and immediately went into “protective mode” once the pandemic struck.
Typical visitation ground to a standstill and anyone entering the hospital was screened, questioned and monitored to make sure they were not bringing the deadly virus into the infirmary.
That left Mathew with the difficult job of keeping the kids entertained — while keeping apart from them herself — and making sure they can still communicate with their loved ones who can no longer visit them in person.
She makes sure they have bedside iPads and the ability to connect with their family virtually whenever they want.
She’s also tried to bring some “normalcy” to their day to day life by implementing socially-distanced music therapy programs, movie nights and games.
“We had to get creative,” Mathew said.
She has also set up virtual birthday parties for the kids, with staff bringing in a cake and singing “Happy Birthday” — while she received pictures of the event from another floor.
“I really wasn’t part of going up to sing for the child [because] again, exposure as limited as possible onto the unit is my goal. That is something I’m trying to strongly enforce with every team. They are only entering the units if they truly needed to be there to do something with the children,” Mathew said.
“It is a sad feeling for the fact that maybe all the privileges we had yesterday or a few months ago, are not present at this moment in time. But my role, I believe, is to see the brighter side of things, to be able to guide staff through those hard times … and remind them of why we do what we do,” she went on.
“I signed up to do what I’m doing here at St. Mary’s to really give back… I will get up every day to do what it takes to support that population.”
Still, sometimes exceptions can be made.
She recalled a new patient whose dad wasn’t present for intake and couldn’t see his child. The father showed up to the hospital, begging to see his kid for just “15 minutes.”
“There is no guarantee when the father is next seeing the child. So I cannot deny him the 15 minutes that he requested,” Mathew said.
She spoke with the child’s clinical care team and moved the kid into a single room so the dad could come in the next day.
“It was the right thing because with all given circumstances and his child’s condition, where he asked for a reasonable 15 minutes, we could produce that for him,” Mathew said.
“That was going to be life changing for him and his wife and his child. That, to me, cannot be replaced with anything.”
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