NEW YORK, USA — Decked in uncomfortable layers of PPE, Dr. Katie Ryken is like many Iowa physicians on the front lines.
"You should feel like you're suffocating if you're wearing it correctly," Ryken said, as she put on an N-95 mask.
The Iowa City native and 2016 grad from Carver College of Medicine now serves in a hospital in the deadliest city in the nation for COVID-19, New York City.
"It's hard to be away from Iowa in general in a time like this," Ryken said.
It's a time when Katie, a third-year OB-GYN resident, is seeing pregnant mothers pass away before her eyes.
"High risk pregnancies in the Bronx are very common," Ryken said. "And people who get COVID on top of that, it was really devastating."
Soon, Katie lost coworkers and friends. The hospital's PA system became a haunting refrain.
"I was never prepared for the amount of codes that we heard being called over the PA system. Because for awhile, it was just cardiac arrest, after cardiac arrest, after cardiac arrest," Ryken said.
At the same time, Katie's hospital was running out of PPE.
Her daughter surrounded by death, Katie's mother, Shonda, began to worry.
"I never imagined that she would be put at such high risk in her own residency program in the United States," said Shonda Ryken.
Shonda said her own mother, Katie's grandma Fern Meyer, over in Ackley, Iowa, was worried too.
"She felt helpless, she felt that she wanted to do something,"said Shonda.
Grandma Fern got to work. She and her friends in Ackley sewed nearly one hundred masks and shipped them to New York City for Katie and all her coworkers.
"My grandma was really excited because there was actually a segment on Good Morning America," Ryken said. "They were wearing some of Grandma Fern's masks on Good Morning America."
Now, Katie's smiling. Her hospital now has enough PPE. But now it's Katie's turn to worry about her family in Iowa.
She's said she's shocked the state's starting to reopen.
"Even the nurses on the labor floor are horrified when I say what's happening, because you know who grandma Fern is now," Ryken said. "They have her masks."
While Ryken works to save lives in New York, in a way now, she feels helpless. She hopes her friends and family will take seriously measures they need save their own lives.
"I think Iowans are doing the right things, I just think that we need to keep doing them for longer," Ryken said.