CLEVELAND — There is comfort in knowing that so many people are now hard at work doing good.
On Friday, 25 healthcare workers from the Cleveland Clinic left for New York City to volunteer.
On Saturday Eric Keith, a nurse from University Hospitals, left too.
“I know the people that I’m leaving behind in my workplace and I know that they can handle this,” said Keith. “It’s about helping the most people that you can.”
Though the hard-hit state of New York has improved, hospitals still struggle.
It was a friend who’s a nurse in New York who inspired Keith.
“She told me that they have patients stacked two to a room on full oxygen because they were not allowed to be ventilated,” he said. “It sounds like a lot of chaos.”
Yet there have been moments of tenderness.
Cathi Logan, a flight attendant how living in Denver, recently visited her mother at a local care facility during a layover in Cleveland.
She held up a sign as her mom came to the window.
“We had just moved my mom into the facility, so she had only been there maybe three days before everything went into lockdown,” Logan said. “My mom’s a former marine, so I feel like she’s really been a good a trooper.”
Then there is what Eric Ludwig did with his company, Pulsar, when he teamed up with KMK.
Both make promotional paper products for cruise lines and big box retail, but recently switched to making masks.
“We said, ‘We could wait for the large companies, like 3M, who are amazing, and help these big hospitals because they’re like, they can’t do it all,’” Ludwig said.
The companies will now donate 70,000 masks to local businesses including University Hospitals’ Rainbow Babies and Childrens, MedWish International, Heinen’s, Dollar General, The Weil’s, Menorah Park, Arden Courts and the Chagrin Valley Chamber of Commerce.
“In the next few weeks we’re donating over 70,000 pieces to people in Northeast Ohio,” Ludwig said, “That makes us feel really good.”
Throughout the community, people are helping each other out however they can.
On Saturday, firefighters stopped by Marymount Hospital in Garfield Heights to simply thank staff changing shifts.
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