CHARLESTON, S.C. — Over the past two years, the most serious effects of the COVID pandemic have happened mostly behind closed doors -- in private homes and hospitals, where more than 800 thousand Americans have died and many more have been sick.
But a nurse in South Carolina has documented part of that enormous human toll -- in photographs.
When Alan Hawes goes to work at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, he brings with him a special ability when he cares for the sickest of the sick COVID patients. He takes pictures of what most of people will never see, because before he became a nurse 11 years ago, he spent 23 years as a newspaper photographer, and that allows him to tell the stories of these patients.
"This is a gentleman named Ryan Simpson," Hawes told CBS reporter David Begnaud, while describing one of his photos. "We had to send him urgently to our cardiac ICU,"
"You all believe COVID is what damaged the heart so severely?" Begnaud responded.
"Oh yeah, absolutely. His heart was beating so fast for many days."
"How fast?"
"One hundred and thirty-five to one hundred and sixty-five. And this is Ryan's wife. So this is the first moment that she saw him that day as she just stood in the doorway and was, I think, kind of taken aback by all the people in the room as they were preparing to take him to the operating room."
So many front line nurses have said: "If you saw what we see."
Hawes convinced the largest hospital in South Carolina to allow him to give sight to what caregivers routinely see.
"This is a woman who is very sick. She was with us for a long, long time and her family brought in this prayer cloth that they wanted to stay with her at all times." Hawes commented about another patient.
"The family wasn't able to visit, but this prayer cloth was sort of their representative," said Begnaud, to which Hawes agreed.
"At one point, they did get to visit, but they only were able to look through a window and they could see the prayer cloth inside the room."
"And what happened to the lady?" Begnaud asked.
"She didn't make it. she didn't make it." Hawes replied.
His pictures document COVID's grip as it tightens.
A picture is shown of a patient lying in the hospital bed on his cell phone.
"He was totally there. As you can see, he's texting people on his cell phone telling them what's going on." Hawes explained to Begnaud.
"And why did you want to capture this?"
"I felt like I knew where he was going. I knew it was going to happen to him in the next couple of days."
"And what happened?"
"This is what happened," Hawes said as a picture of the patient showed him lying in the bed with his eyes shut. "So two days later, I walked in, and there he was."
"Is he alive?"
"Yes, he's still here, unvaccinated."
"So you're now at a place if I'm hearing you right where you're like, 'c'est la vie' -- it is what it is. Don't want to get vaccinated? Wind up here." Begnaurd says.
"I have quite a few times had a patient who's unvaccinated, and when they come in, I'll look at them and I think to myself, 'You did this to yourself' but that doesn't last long. Part of being a good nurse is having empathy. Once you hear the stories of some of our patients from their family members, you can become a fan of that person and you just know that they've made a bad decision."
"You humanize them," Begnaurd said. "And then you start to find out who they are."
"I mean, nurses are broken right now, emotionally."
"Are you?"
"I feel like I am. Yes."
"How long did you have to work over the hospital to get permission to do this?"
"A year and a half a year and a half. I think the time when I got approval to do the project, I titled my email "Public Service Project" and I think that's what made the difference."
Patients and family members give him permission to photograph them.
"I think people have a message that they want to get out there."
The mother holding a picture of her newborn she cannot touch; the girlfriend who keeps a bedside journal, "Steve James Lavender, you know that I love you with all of my heart and soul. you better not ever leave me. you know, I wouldn't be able to live without you," it reads in part.
"Every night I tell all my patients, all my family members, this is a roller coaster. This is two steps forward, one step back."
Hawes' colleague was a nurse. Triple vaccinated. a life-long asthma patient.
"With all due respect, this is one example where a picture doesn't actually do it justice."
"No, it doesn't. This is a picture of where I was like, man, I wish I had video."
A CBS producer was in the room with a video camera as a man was gasping for air to breathe while Hawes took his picture.
"I do wonder whether some people are going to be like, put that camera down and pay attention just like full-time nurse."
"Yeah, well, when I'm doing that, they're not my patients. I don't take pictures of my own patients."
27-year-old Keam was an exception.
"She is such a unique person that she was able to tolerate the ventilator and not need a ton of sedation."
"And so what did she write on the board for you?"
"That says, I feel miserable here."
"Do you think Keam's going to make it?" Begnaurd asked.
"I think so. She's just got such a spark of life, I can't imagine if she has anything to do with it." Said Hawes.
"This is Mr. Croxton. He had the heartstrings of about every nurse in our unit when he was there."
Joel David Croxton was 72 when he died. This was the nurse who broke down after calling Croxton's wife to tell her it was time to say goodbye. his wife Sandy arrived to hold his hand, a nurse using an iPad to FaceTime with a chaplain.