Graveyard Shift

ISABELLE PAPADIMITRIOU WAS FINALLY A GRANDMA. The baby girl, Lua, was born in August 2019 in Brooklyn. Though Papadimitriou lived in Coppell and worked as a respiratory therapist in Dallas, she’d been able to visit her granddaughter in New York twice, and in June 2020, she was eager to visit again. “Lua was her everything; it was all about Lua,” says Fiana Tulip, Papadimitriou’s daughter and Lua’s mother. Then, COVID-19 cases spiked in Texas and the trip no longer felt safe. They called it off, and the 64-year-old Papadimitriou started to put in extra shifts at work instead. Later that month, around the time she was supposed to be visiting family, Papadimitriou caught the coronavirus. After a weeklong battle with the virus, she died on July 4.

A Brownsville native, Papadimitriou worked at the Baylor Scott & White Institute for Rehabilitation near downtown Dallas. According to Tulip, Papadimitriou was working with patients in the month of June without sufficient protective equipment. “As the surge hit, they didn’t have enough PPE to protect the workers, so what they did was reuse just basic surgical masks,” Tulip says, even as the rehab center was receiving COVID-positive patients from the hospital. In at least one case, Tulip says, Papadimitriou wasn’t warned that a patient she worked with had the virus. In late June, Papadimitriou began to feel sick and tried to fight the illness at home for a week. By the time she went to a hospital, her lungs were full, and it was too late. “It was so fast,” says Tulip. “It was a shock because she’s such a strong human being.”

The virus has collided with a federal and state labor safety regime that’s suffered years of malign neglect.

To pay for her mom’s funeral, Tulip raised money on GoFundMe and got a grant from a foundation that gives relief to families affected by COVID-19. There are still potential ambulance and medical bills to worry about. Even though Tulip believes her mom caught COVID-19 on the job,