Nobody knows the danger more than Gina Mullen. She could have just said no.

But when her husband, Jim, said he wanted to pack a bag to go nurse some of the sickest victims of COVID-19 during the dead of night in the hardest-hit city in America, she didn’t invoke her marriage veto privilege.

Gina, an emergency room doctor in Dallas, was already on the front line of the coronavirus fight, when Jim, an emergency room nurse for five years before beginning his law career in 2015, told her that he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t respond.

“I had this skill that would let me help people, but I wasn’t putting it to any use,” he recalls telling her. “And more and more people were dying. … I felt I had an obligation to go do it.”

All of us are making some sacrifices in this historic pandemic, but the one Gina and Jim Mullen have chosen to make is enormous. With a nice home near Las Colinas, well-paying, secure jobs, and full-time help for their 2 1/2-year-old daughter, Gracie, they could have ridden out this crisis in relative comfort.

Instead, Monday morning Jim was just coming off his 10th straight 7 p.m.-to-7 a.m. shift at a Queens, New York hospital that’s overflowed with dead and dying coronavirus patients. He reported Monday that the ER has been a bit less crowded the last two nights, but said it’s too soon to know if that trend will hold.

Jim Mullen, in N95 mask and scrubs, before one of his overnight shifts in a hospital emergency room in Queens. (Jim Mullen / handout)

In the predawn hours Monday, Jim said, he even got the time “to hold the hand of an elderly woman who will likely never see her family again. ... It is a hopeless feeling knowing that there is nothing you can do for them but try to make them comfortable. She was still alive when I got off shift, but she is not long for this world.”

Jim talked to me over the last couple of days about his ER experiences because he wants North Texans to know what the future could hold for us if we don’t follow the rules and stay home.

“This is like nothing I’ve ever seen,” he said by phone from New York Sunday morning. “When you see someone who is just terrified for their life. They’ve got that shortness of breath. They’ve got that pain in their chest … You see them practically in tears because they think they are going to die and … they know they are not going to get to see their family ever again if they do.”

Repeatedly over the past 10 days, despite his best efforts, the fragile health of many of those frightened patients has deteriorated quickly. Even when they go on a ventilator, he said, some still die.

If people could see what he sees, Jim said, they wouldn’t ignore stay-at-home orders. “If people don’t listen, they are headed to a place where they don’t want to go because of resources being overwhelmed.”

During his shifts, Jim has stacked bodies in an 18-wheeler serving as a temporary morgue, used whatever piece-meal tubing he can find on the crash cart for critical drips and calculated the flow of critical medications without the computerized device designed to regulate the drugs.

Worst of all, he has been forced to face the wretched reality that losing only two or three patients is “a good night” for his acute care unit.

Jim Mullen with his daughter, Gracie, on the day he graduated in 2018 from the University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law. (Gina Mullen / handout)

On most every shift, he told me, “we just find a person dead in the hallway because we had so many patients that by the time a nurse finished working on the last of your 11 patients and you finally made it back to the first, they would be dead.”

Before Jim left for New York, Gina, 32, the medical director for two Dallas-area ERs, including Baylor Scott & White Medical Center Uptown, already was seeing coronavirus cases during the 55 hours a week she puts in at various medical centers.

Although the scene in Dallas is nothing like that in New York, Gina originally tried to dissuade Jim from a temporary nursing job when he raised the idea in mid-March.

“We don’t want two people in the house exposed when we have a young kid,” she kept telling him. Then one morning, he returned from playing golf to plead his case yet again and, “I realized I had to put my big girl panties on” and support his decision, Gina said.

Jim, 36, worked as an ER nurse in Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital and Methodist Charlton Medical Center in far southern Dallas before switching careers. He earned his degree at the University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law in 2018 and became a personal injury attorney.

He practices at the Curtis Law Group in Dallas, where the founder, Bill Curtis, supports his mission to use his medical skills to help out during the current crisis. Jim is trying to stay on top of his legal cases -- including what he characterized as the 150 daily emails -- but he says he is lucky to have a boss who continues to pay him while he is in New York.

Mullen originally tried to join the coronavirus fight in North Texas, but local hospitals aren’t in need of extra help now. Jim kept looking for opportunities and on March 31 contacted a national emergency medical staffing agency based in Kansas; three days later he was on a plane – empty but for a handful of fellow medical workers -- bound for New York.

Before he left, he and Gina talked about what she described as “all that stuff you don’t want to talk about. ‘If something goes bad, what do you want me to do? What do you want us to do?’ Making sure our will was done. All the things you put on the back burner forever.”

Jim said that tearing himself away from Gina and Gracie will “forever be the hardest thing I have ever had to do.” Gina said she tried to put on the strongest face possible for Gracie. “I don’t think she’s seen me cry.”

Arriving at Manhattan’s Park Central Hotel, filled exclusively with temporary workers, Jim was told he’d get his hospital assignment the next morning. But when he overheard the talk that a volunteer was needed in a level one trauma center in the Bronx, he offered to go.

Jim had hardly gotten his gloves on before he was enlisted to help move bodies of deceased patients from floors throughout the hospital to the refrigerated trucks. Jim said he spent the first part of the shift inside the makeshift morgue as he organized the chaotically stacked bodies.

Once he had finished the several “body runs,” he said, it was a night of a “mass of sick people – you are treating patients in a way you never would under normal circumstances.”

Emergency room doctor Gina Mullen helps her daughter, 2-year-old Gracie, hunt for Easter eggs in their front yard on Sunday. (Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

The scene at his permanent assignment, a smaller emergency room in Queens, was the same. Jim told me that eight of the 10 shifts he’s worked so far are “what I would have said was the worst shift of my life had I not come here.”

Jim is in the ER’s acute care section, a unit for the most critical patients in the emergency room designed to hold 16 patients at most. In recent days, it has housed as many as 35 to 40 coronavirus victims.

On a bad night, he said, the unit loses 10 people; on a good one, two to three. Under normal circumstances, Jim pointed out, a nurse would be assigned only two or three critical patients so they could watch for signs of deterioration and at least attempt an intervention before a person dies.

But at this ER, “it becomes literally a race against time,” Jim said. With some critically ill patients, he said, “we’re just holding on for dear life to get a spot” in the hospital where they can receive closer observation.

Jim’s descriptions are chilling yet cool-headed and matter-of-fact. “I think that’s why I can do what I do in the ER,” he said. “I feel terrible about everything my patients are going through. But if I spend a whole lot of time thinking about it, I’d never be able to go back and do it the next shift.”

He also tries not to think about the reality that he’s very likely to contract the disease himself.

As we talked about his previous shift, he remembered one woman in terrible distress who kept removing her oxygen mask and coughing on him. “I think I’d be very, very lucky to get out of there and not contract COVID. … When I get it, hopefully I’ll be able to recover.”

Jim and Gina Mullen at Disney World with their daughter, Gracie. (Family photo)

Jim’s temporary-work contract is for 21 straight days. He hasn’t reserved a flight home yet because, if the situation remains bad, he may stay on longer.

The pay is jaw-dropping: $10,000 for seven 12-hour shifts -- although New York state taxes will take a big chunk of that salary. Gina laughed when I asked her if the money was part of Jim’s motivation. “That was the last thing he was thinking about.”

A bus carries Jim and the scores of other temporary medical workers to and from the hospital in Queens. In the ER, he wears scrubs, a disposable gown, N95 and surgical masks, goggles and hair net.

At the hotel, he has a meticulous cleaning regimen for his goggles and N95 mask; he sends his scrubs to the onsite laundry. Jim brought four N95 masks with him from Texas in order to rotate them every three days then put them in a brown paper bag for 72 hours.

The hotel doesn’t serve food, so he lives mostly on protein bars, water and an occasional turkey sandwich made from provisions he purchased at Target his first day in the city. “Eating has not been very frequent or healthy for me, but I could use to lose a few pounds so it’s not a big deal.”

He’s lost count of the days but they are always the same: “I take a shower, fall on the bed, make one call to Gina and Gracie, then fall asleep.”

Gina says a little imagination has gone a long way to helping Gracie cope with Jim’s absence. Among his last-minute must-dos before leaving was shaving his beard and buzzing his hair in order to properly wear his N95 mask. Gracie put all the change together and decided, “‘Daddy went to get his beard’ and she seems OK with that,” Gina laughed.

Gracie Mullen, 2, hunts for Easter eggs in her front yard on Sunday in Irving. Her parents are emergency room doctor Gina Mullen and emergency room nurse Jim Mullen. Gina works in hospitals in Dallas and Jim went to help treat COVID-19 patients in New York City. (Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)

Gracie does know that her father is caring for some sick people far away, and recently when she was missing her father, Gina said, “she told me she was sick too and ‘I need Daddy.”

Jim, originally from New Hampshire, met Gina, then a resident with the Emory School of Medicine, while he was working as an ER nurse in Atlanta. He proposed to the New Orleans native on the hospital’s helipad, and Gina’s medical opportunities brought them to Dallas almost six years ago.

As much as Jim loves emergency room work, he always knew he would need to do something different as he got older. “Being a male nurse, especially someone who is a little bigger like me, I spent a lot of time, for instance, wrestling with psych patients. It’s a very physical job.”

He figured once he got his law degree, he’d wind up in hospital administration or as a medical center counsel, but Bill Curtis offered him an internship with his Curtis Law Group and Jim’s been there since 2018. Because almost all of Jim’s cases result from car and truck accidents, he recently branded himself “CrashNurse” on social media.

But he never suspected he’d actually be trading his suits for scrubs. He credits Curtis for supporting the calling he felt to go to New York and said his boss’ only concern was about the younger lawyer’s health.

Jim also brushes off any suggestion that what he’s doing is remarkable: “It would almost be like a chain reaction if people started saying, ‘Oh, we’re gonna get sick here. It’s too dangerous. We’re just going to go home.’ All of a sudden, there’d be nobody left to help.”

If all goes well, Jim will go into a 14-day quarantine when he returns to North Texas. He told me spending that time, in a hotel room or Airbnb, will likely be harder than his work in New York because, “I’ll be like five minutes down the road from my family and will be impatient to get home.”

Despite Jim’s passion for what he’s doing in New York, he has no plans to return permanently to nursing – “unless COVID is permanent."

Gina just shakes her head at the thought of her husband now working overnight in one of the busiest ERs with some of the country’s sickest patients. “I told him initially, whatever you can do, try to get day shift because it’s already going to be hard enough. And lo and behold, here he is on night shift.”

Back in North Texas, Gina juggles her own stressful medical and management responsibilities with being the only on-site parent to Gracie. “I just pray for God’s protection over both of us and our families,” she told me. “At some point, you can’t take on the burden of worrying about every single thing. That’s where I’m at right now -- literally, put it in God’s hands.”

Coming off yet another long night in his Queens emergency room, Jim most wanted me to pass the word that his words aren’t a scare tactic. Those who get to a critical state and pass away is a small percentage. “But if you do become sick, the care you are going to receive is 100 percent dependent on the availability of the resources,” he said.

“You don’t want to be anywhere near what this is like,” he said. “Pay attention and do what you’re told.”