A pregnant Brooklyn nurse burdened by the guilt of passing coronavirus to her family is being dragged back to work on the front-lines — against her doctors’ advice and despite a nasty case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, The Post has learned.
“It’s scary not knowing the long term effects that this virus could possibly have on my overall well-being, my health, my mental health,” Tamekia Melong, a 31-weeks-pregnant nurse at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center, told The Post. “It’s scary not knowing if I could get reinfected again…and it’s scary if I passed it to the baby.”
The 37-year-old Baldwin, Long Island woman started experiencing coronavirus symptoms two days into her March 9 medical leave for unrelated pregnancy complications, according to workers compensation claim records.
Lab tests from March 24 later confirmed that she had COVID-19, according to the claim documents.
“I was really really sick,” Melong, a registered nurse, told The Post.
Melong, who is pregnant with her first child, also had to live with the burden that she unwittingly passed the virus along to other family members one of whom needed to be hospitalized.
“I felt guilty,” Melong said of her family. “They end up getting infected as well when they are doing their best to care for you.”
During Melong’s two-week battle with the virus she experienced a cough, the chills, trouble breathing, loss of hearing, smell and taste and she didn’t feel her baby move for a full 24 hours at one point, the workers’ comp claim says.
Melong used all of her sick and vacation days for the first month, and now she isn’t getting paid.
“My workplace, they are refusing to take responsibility and they don’t have my back at all,” Melong said.
Wyckoff Heights “did not believe that she had contracted [COVID-19] at the hospital since she was on medical leave of absence already,” the workers’ comp papers say adding that her last shift was on March 4.
Melong said that while she didn’t personally tend to the hospital’s first coronavirus case she was around residents who did and who later tested positive.
Melong said she and her family have since recovered from the virus and from what doctors can see the fetus is healthy.
Still, “[t]here is no way of seeing if the virus has been transmitted to the fetus,” she said.
Meanwhile, the hospital wants her to work again and told her she will lose her health insurance if she doesn’t return.
Her lawyer said the hospital has denied her workers’ compensation claim which now must be litigated.
Returning to work is out of the question, according to her physician, Dr. Charles Edwards Robins.
“I think she absolutely should not go back to work. She does have severe symptoms of PTSD. She has been severely traumatized as a result of this COVID-19 thing,” the trauma psychotherapist told The Post.
“It has had tremendous personal effects in her own life,” Robins said. “She thinks she is to blame now for the hardships of her family.”
The doctor recommended that she attend video therapy sessions twice a week.
”There is a big difference between being essential and expendable,” said Melong’s lawyer Jason Goldfarb of the Goldfarb Law Group. “You can’t pick up a paper or watch the news without hearing how much everybody loves these essential workers, such as Tamekia.
“But then when it comes time to do the right thing they are treating them as merely expendable.”
Wyckoff Heights president and CEO of Ramon Rodriguez told The Post that the hospital wants to help Melong.
“We have a complete difference of opinion with respect to the facts that she alludes to but we are happy to speak with her and to communicate and try to be helpful in any way we can.”
“We look forward to trying to help her anyway we can that’s within the contract that we have with the New York State Nurses Association,” Rodriguez said adding that he wasn’t aware of her workers’ comp claim.