Part Three: Resilience During the Pandemic
Cayenne Booth
Cayenne Booth
Cayenne Booth’s account of her experience during the COVID pandemic, when she worked in a hospital, reads like a war story. The situation required that she step up, and she did.
Pandemic
I love the phrase, “If you find a job you love, then you will never work a day in your life,” but I know for a fact the author of that quote has never been an essential worker during a pandemic. During the COVID19 pandemic I tended to children in respiratory distress, comforted burnt-out parents, and cared for my own household. It’s one thing to love your job and another to feel like you have your whole community depending on you. In my position as medical assistant at Boston’s Children's Hospital North Riverdale Pediatrics (in the Bronx), I worked the first two years straight with no days off. But none of this was the problem. The problem was that I thought I had seen it all, heard it all, and felt it all.
When I started working at the hospital in 2020, I was the luckiest girl in the world. I was fresh out of school, and I got to work during a world crisis. In fact, I was so lucky that my immune system decided to work too well.
In March 2020 God decided New York City needed to go through an extensive personal development course that would last a little under three years. It was the most transformative three years of my life.
In December of 2021, I was eating lunch in the Lab, (because the small office was not originally built to have eight employees), when the office door buzzed. I quickly put on my office gown and fitted an N95 mask and shield on my face. At the door was Dr. Hirshman’s daughter; she had come to drop off her mother’s COVID swab and get tested herself. His wife had become fragile from multiple health conditions and Dr. Hirschman took his marital vow of “in sickness and in health” seriously. I started the COVID machines and then swabbed his daughter. Then she went to sit with her father in his office, unmasked, as they ate lunch together with the doors closed. Exactly three minutes later the machines pinged.
I was standing in front of the machines in disbelief. These were molecular COVID tests that took exactly 15 minutes to run when you didn't have COVID, but if it stopped early, you were infected. I heard Dr. Brand’s heavy footsteps as she came rushing through the lab door.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! ALAN!” she yelled. Two minutes later Dr. Hirschman too walked into the lab, masked. Dr. Berger and Dr. Hirschman’s daughter were right behind him.
“I’m sorry everyone. I really am.” There was hurt in Dr. Hirschman’s voice, because he had spent half the day possibly infecting everyone in the office and because his wife had it as well.
He quickly packed his stuff and left with his daughter. Meanwhile Dr. Brand had rounded everyone in the office in full PPE and was COVID-swabbing us one by one in the backyard. By the end of the week our office of eight had become an office of three and stayed that way for the next two weeks. Those two weeks, Pediatrics of North Riverdale opened earlier and closed late. Dr. Berger, Diane the office manager, and I saw all the patients that normally took three doctors. We treated over 100 patients a day, with everyone claiming to be an emergency. We made sure that the children who could be helped avoided the ER at all costs. If we could prevent children from being stuck in the overflowing emergency rooms filled with diseases they did not need to be exposed to, then we did it. That meant taking blood, doing specialty tests, using our oxygen tanks, and even calling in favors to specialty children’s hospitals outside of the city.
We survived those two weeks, but Diane nearly passed out from overexertion, my body was covered in stress hives and at the end of the two weeks, Dr. Berger caught COVID. I would like to say that was the worst of it, but honestly it only became normal for us to work like that. By 2023, I had traded in my stress hives for borderline diabetes because of my messed-up eating habits from all the work, but I felt like I was where I needed to be. The medical field was a fulfilling career choice, and I loved everything about it. Another reason why I loved my job was because it was my daughter Lehlani’s pediatrician’s office. Not only was I the coolest mom ever being my child’s nurse; it also made getting her asthma medication so much easier.
COVID ran through my household twice, courtesy of my stepfather. Thanks to my job I had access to free COVID testing, and I took a lot of precautions to not bring COVID home. I did all the household shopping, disinfected the house daily, and I even got undressed in the hallway. Every day my mother would leave a GLAD bag on the doorknob with my robe and slippers, just so I didn't bring COVID into the house. As soon as I came in the house I went straight into the shower. But I alone couldn't keep my asthmatic mother and daughter safe. The second time my mother and stepfather caught COVID I took my daughter straight to the job to get tested. That Monday morning, Dr. Brand met me in front of the office building to retrieve the COVID swab from me. I had a stash of COVID swabs in my house after the first time my stepfather had caught it. I had swabbed Lehlani in the house and put it in a Ziplock bag. We waited for the results outside. As I said, positives only took three minutes. It was the longest three minutes of my life; it was also the coldest because it was January 3rd. Then Dr. Brand facetimed me and told me that Lehlani was positive. My heart fell to the bottom of my stomach.
“Does she have any symptoms? How is her asthma?”
“No, nothing,” I said. “She was just exposed,” I was confused because I had seen hundreds of children horribly sick with COVID19, but she was fine. I took Lehlani home and explained that even though she felt okay, she had to stay in her room and wear a mask around the house for two weeks. As I closed the door, she was jumping up and down on her bed celebrating her two-week vacation.
In October of that year, I finally caught COVID from a premature newborn who was struggling to breathe; I too had no symptoms and had lost the fear of what COVID could do to my health.
Lehlani and I had no permanent side effects, but my mother did. Her asthma was progressively getting worse, so the doctor put my mother on injections and changed her inhalers. But on October 23, 2023, my mother passed away from an asthma attack while I was at work.
The next night my grandparents came over so I could explain how everything had happened.
“To tell you the truth, Cayenne I think she would still be alive if you had been at home,” my grandmother said. “I think you would have been able to help her.”
“I can’t stop God’s timing grandma, and I don't want to question Him.”
You see my favorite Bible story is the book of Job. God allowed the devil to take everything from Job to prove that people will turn their backs on God when He stops blessing them. Job stood his ground and God replaced everything Job lost.
No, I did not blame God for making such choices; instead on January 4th I left my job to take care of Lehlani and myself. (I have yet to find another job that engages and teaches the way that office did.) I had lost my mother, and Lehlani had lost her best friend. Lehlani and I used to act more like sisters than mother and daughter but the pandemic changed all of that. Life after COVID19 was a new journey.
Cayenne and Lehlani at work
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
*Cayenne Booth has two young children and works part time as a phlebotomist. She spent the last three years building a more enriched life while also expanding her knowledge in the medical and wellness fields. She is passionate about being “present” as a mother and creating lasting family memories. Guided by faith and strengthened by community, she strives to live a life of purpose and continued growth.
© 2026 Cayenne Booth. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution—Non-Commercial—No-Derivatives License (CC-BY-NC-ND), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction, of the full, original text for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited.
~~~
Anonymous
This was the view from the author’s window during COVID.
The author grew up having to navigate change from an early age. When the COVID-19 pandemic started she was a senior in high school. It was an unexpected shift for everyone, but she and her family had a singularly tough experience. She came through the pandemic strengthened and with a more mature perspective.
Catata
When I was born, my parents were already thinking about leaving. They were living in my grandparents’ house in Santo Domingo—two daughters and a newborn, too many bodies for one space. So, they moved to a smaller town nearby, Santo Domingo Este, where the heat wrapped around you the second you stepped outside and the dust clung to your skin like it belonged there.
My dad used to call me cacata—tarantula. He said it jokingly, but there was a reason behind it. The humidity made my hair expand in every direction, just like tarantulas, wild and untamed. During hurricane season, cacatas crawled up the walls like they owned the house. My mom would grab a machete and slice them in half without hesitation. The same with Dominican centipedes—long, fast, ancient-looking things that felt older than the house itself.
My dad built our house with his own hands: two bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room that spilled into the kitchen, and a patio filled with trees, chickens, and whatever else made its way inside. He loved his chickens and watched them carefully, like they were something fragile.
Raising three kids in the D.R. during the early 2000s wasn’t easy. The economy collapsed under Hipólito Mejía. The peso lost value, prices rose, and banks went bankrupt. My mom was a nurse manager, which should have meant stability, but it didn’t. One paycheck barely covered groceries. My dad worked in administration at the same hospital, but his salary disappeared just as quickly.
They stretched everything — food, money, and patience. They skipped meals, rationed portions, pawned a hair dryer just to afford my powdered milk.
When it rained, water slipped through the zinc roof. Drops fell onto my face at night, waking me up. I should have hated it, but I didn’t. The steady tapping against the metal sounded like music. It was one of the few things that stayed consistent.
In 2008, my dad left for New York. He didn’t speak English, but he went to see if there was something better for us there and a year later, he came back for me. Not my sisters — just me. At the airport, my mom held me longer than usual. My sisters cried quietly. I didn’t cry because I thought I would be back soon.
New York felt unfamiliar. Everything moved fast, especially the language. Kids had things I had never seen before and lives that looked nothing like mine. For the first time, I noticed the differences—the way I spoke, the way I looked.
I lived with my grandparents but I never fully felt like I belonged. My aunt reminded me I wasn’t one of her kids. My grandmother tried to fix my hair, to make it straighter, more “presentable”. I remember running from the smell of the chemicals and the burning feeling on my scalp. My dad didn’t know what to do, so he called my mom.
“Bring her back,” she said.
Nine months later, I returned to the Dominican Republic. When my mom saw me, she cried. I had lost weight because my dad worked long hours and I ate what was there, not knowing it wasn’t enough. My mom decided to keep me with her until I was older.
In 2015, when I was 12, I went back to New York. This time, I stayed in my aunt's apartment sharing a room with my cousins. Four years later, my little brother joined us, so my dad rented a shared room in the Bronx. It was the closest we had been to being a family in years, but the space was tight. Nine people plus a dog lived in a two-bedroom apartment. The kitchen was always full, so I stayed in the room (that I shared with my brother and sometimes my father) most of the time. That room had become my main space.
March 2020 brought the world to a halt. COVID-19 shut everything down, and our lives shrank to the single room. Our room was on Mount Eden Avenue in the Bronx, so close to the Cross Bronx Expressway that we could see and hear traffic. The elevated subway tracks ran right outside my window. The #4 train had never looked so empty. I still heard the automated voice, “Stand clear of the closing doors, please,” but there was no one in the way. Before COVID, the subway cars were often full; people pressed against each other, heat and sweat making it hard to breathe. Sometimes I was pushed, barely able to move. But during COVID each train car held only one or two people. Sometimes none.
Montefiore Hospital was near our room and after a while refrigerated trucks lined the nearby streets, holding bodies that couldn’t fit inside the hospital. We kept the windows closed, afraid of the air, of what might come in.
Inside, it was just me and my brother most of the time. I helped him with his math homework, sitting next to him for hours as he tried to focus. Sometimes he would get frustrated, staring at the screen, not understanding. I tried to explain things the best I could, even when I wasn’t sure myself. There was no teacher walking around the classroom, no classmates to compete and cooperate with—just me, him, and our computers. We did what we could to figure things out together.
When I got tired of watching the train I would look down at the highway and count the cars. There were so few cars that I never made it to 20.
The window stayed covered most of the time, blocked with layers to keep out germs and noise from the subway and highway. But I still looked. I needed to. It was the only way to see the sky, the sunsets and to remind myself the world was still there. At the same time, out the window was everything I didn’t want to see—the trucks, the empty streets, the flashing lights from ambulances that never seemed to stop.
The owner of the room wanted us to move out. At some point mid-pandemic, my dad partially moved us into a shelter seeking housing assistance. It wasn’t permanent, but it was different. Breakfast—boiled eggs, oatmeal, pancakes, sometimes juice—was simple but warm. Each meal made me feel cared and reminded me of home.
We moved between the shelter and the room for a while, never fully settled in either. But we followed whatever routine we could until it became our norm.
In 2021, my mom got her U.S. residency (her visa, allowing her to come to the U.S.) and she came to visit us from the Dominican Republic. Everything changed for the better, for a little while. She cooked, waited for us to eat together, filled the space in a way that made it feel less temporary. Even though we were still moving from the room to the shelter and back again, it didn’t feel as tight or overwhelming. It felt warmer. My dad softened too. He spoke differently, acted differently, like we were a version of a family he still remembered how to be part of.
In the summer of 2021, we finally left the room and the shelter for good and moved into a two-bedroom apartment. For the first time, nothing had to be shared with strangers. The kitchen and the bathroom were ours and the space didn’t feel borrowed. At last I didn’t feel like I had to adjust. We had a home where I belonged.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
*The author graduated from Lehman College in 2024 and is a nurse in New York City.
© 2026 Anonymous. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution—Non-Commercial—No-Derivatives License (CC-BY-NC-ND), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction, of the full, original text for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited.
~~~
Lucas Alcantara
Lucas Alcantara
Lucas’s fond, nostalgic reminiscence of riding his bicycle with a “ginormous” group of friends through Harlem and Randall’s Island is a perfect example of the familial spirit of New York.
Where Did Lucas Go?
I didn't learn how to ride a bike until I was 13. It’s embarrassing but I guess I was a late bloomer. Not to mention that as a kid I would usually be home all day playing video games. Nonetheless, it was a formative summer, right before my freshman year of high school in August of 2017 at a small camping site in Cape May, NJ, just thirty minutes from Atlantic city. In the sand and gravel roads outside our cabin I tried over and over just to get on the seat of the bike. I kept falling, racking up a ton of cuts and bruises on my arms and legs. I finally asked for help from my uncle and he simply pushed me down the hill into a road that was regularly patrolled by family SUVs and said, "You'll figure it out.” I was terrified but it worked. I felt free, riding in the breeze, smelling the lake while the wheels on my bike sounded like a fishing rod.
In the following years I would borrow old bikes from friends, ones clearly “loved” in their own ways, with scuffed stickers on them that you can just barely make out as Supreme and Thrasher logos. My friend Cam, a tall Dominican kid with big curly brown hair, and I would meet up at 116th Street and Lexington by the #6 train, our unofficial midpoint between all of our friends’ apartments. We would go door to door gathering our friends, multiplying in numbers gradually until the final apartment by the FDR Drive. By then we were a ginormous group of adolescents biking in the heat of the summer in Harlem. We’d make our way towards Randall’s Island and just loop around the island over and over until dark, stopping for plenty of pictures along the way of course. In hindsight, I didn’t realize how good we had it. We consistently lived out scenes from The Goonies. We raised hell. I remember all the objectively stupid things we did because we were kids. We stole from stores, we biked on the wrong side of the road, and we yelled things like “PENIS” in the streets. Maybe the stupidest of these activities was trusting one another to hold our legs while we hung our bodies off the edge of bridges with nasty New York City river water at the bottom. We went places where you shouldn’t, with people we didn’t know, out at the time of night when you have ten missed calls from your mom and you and all your friends make the same face, saying “Oh shit” in unison. Followed by texts in the family group chat, “Where Did Lucas Go?”.
I’ll always remember those nights, but relationships change and people grow apart. No matter what, I’ll always know that at one point in my youth we all trusted each other with our lives, and I know that when we see each other in the neighborhood, we’ll share a look acknowledging our past life. We’ll nod and smile at each other through the sea of unknown faces in the sea of Harlem and go on with our lives.
~
Finding Lucas Again
I lost a little bit of Lucas during the COVID quarantine. In high school, before the world started to end [the pandemic], I would always talk to strangers in the street with my friends. If I had an opportunity to catch someone off guard, especially in New York where everyone is too busy to have a brief conversation, and possibly make their day, I wouldn’t hesitate to do so. You can imagine that over quarantine I didn’t get much of that classic New York interaction that I loved so much. Being alone in a room all day, not having physical contact with any of my friends drained all the Lucas out of me. To cheer myself up after a failed attempt at a social interaction I cut through Central Park, specifically a path near the Harlem Meer. I found solace sitting on that bench that had the perfect view of the lake and the skyline of the neighborhood I’ve lived in all my life. I was mesmerized by the soothing noise of the ducks in the water coupled with the honking of cars close by. But I was also saddened by the emptiness everyone carried with themselves. This is when I met the lady on the bench. She introduced herself as Layla and told me she was visiting from Canada. I was thrilled to have an actual conversation with someone after so many months of virtual blandness. We instantly hit it off. She talked about her career as a photographer and how much she was loving New York. I talked about my love for film and the deeper meanings behind them. What surprised me was that even though we come from completely different backgrounds we shared a lot of the same interests and thoughts. Through this we shared an assortment of advice and one that stood out the most was not finding happiness through others. Layla told me a story of her past relationship in which she dated a girl who didn’t share the same level of love that she had. When they eventually broke up she kind of broke down, considering that all her joy in life came from that one person instead of her own accomplishments and goals. Although at the time I had not been in a situation like that, it did help me months later when I started to realize I was following that path.
It's funny thinking back that just in the first two hours of knowing each other we gave each other life advice, shared stories of our childhood, and talked about our aspirations. But the thing that will stick with me the most is the fact that I went for it. As soon as I saw the opportunity I took it, because I knew that the moment I hesitated I would’ve lost hope in my social skills. Every day I am so grateful for that conversation because if I didn’t have it, I would have completely lost that last bit of Lucas inside of myself. The bravery I had from talking to this lady on the bench saved me from a very dark place. I am a strong believer that the best moments in life come from complete uncertainty of the future.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
* Lucas Alcantara graduated from Lehman College with a degree in marketing in 2025. He is working as a paraprofessional in the Bronx. Lucasa4422@gmail.com
© 2026 Lucas Alcantara. This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution—Non-Commercial—No-Derivatives License (CC-BY-NC-ND), which permits use, distribution, and reproduction, of the full, original text for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author and source are credited.
~~~