It wasn’t how Anna Mitchell wanted to spend her first day as a registered nurse on Wednesday – crying in her car after learning she had come in contact with a potential COVID-19 patient.

For the past two weeks, Mitchell has been making call outs on social media for a cheap place to stay that would be away from her immunocompromised son but without luck. Due to steep prices at rental spaces and hotels, she couldn’t find a place at first.

Later that day, a Huntsville nonprofit called Recentered stepped up and is giving her, and any other female medical worker, a place to stay free of charge.

“I cannot believe something so incredible is coming just as it's starting to get scary,” Mitchell said.

It’s a precaution many medical workers nationwide are doing: renting out spaces to live away from their loved ones who are vulnerable to the coronavirus. Mitchell didn’t consider herself at the frontlines of the pandemic while working at Encompass Health Rehabilitation Hospital of North Alabama in Huntsville.

But she feels the risks edging closer to coworkers and herself. Mitchell’s first day as a registered nurse was the same day 1,000 coronavirus cases were confirmed in Alabama.

She said her facility just now received test kits. Wearing masks is now mandatory for all Huntsville Hospital Health Systems employees as of Thursday. Mitchell said she had on the appropriate protective gear when she encountered the possible COVID-19 patient, whose test results haven’t came back yet. All the facility’s gloves and masks are stored and locked away so no one can steal the items.

“It's very eye opening. Like being prepared for the battle we have been waiting for,” Mitchell said. “It's so close and any moment it will not only be my patients, but also my coworkers. Just dear God, not my family.”

People who have pre-existing conditions are more likely to suffer from severe symptoms from COVID-19. Mitchell’s son, Brantley, had open-heart surgery when he was born due to a defect and was taken home with IVs and feeding tubes.

As a new mother with no medical experience at that time, Mitchell turned her home into a makeshift hospital. She used two large paint cans to elevate one side of her son’s crib so it would slope. That way, the fluid in Brantley’s lungs would seep down to the base of the lungs. It’s those experiences that inspired Mitchell to enroll at Calhoun Community College and join a workforce dedicated to help make the ill well again.

Brantley is now 8 years old, but he still has a lot of preexisting conditions. To protect her only child, Mitchell changes out of her clothes as soon as she gets back home from work and hops in the shower. She washes off with her last bar antibacterial soap because she can’t find anymore at the store. She’s distancing herself not just from people but from the mannerisms of motherhood. That’s hard, Mitchell said. Although she has stopped kissing Brantley’s face, she finds herself kissing his hair.

Mitchell said she was prepared to live out of her car, which was packed with food, blankets and other essentials like toothpaste, if she didn’t find a place to stay.

“I broke down in tears at one point,” Mitchell said. “I’m tired of feeling like I have a disease.”

Josh Walter, co-founder of Recentered, found out about the need to provided medical workers with a free place to live while he was putting the finishing touches on a five-bedroom-three-bathroom home called the “Life House”. Walter, his wife and his friends have housed about 20 women in crisis since starting Recentered about seven years ago. After partnering with another nonprofit called the Huntsville Dream Center, Recentered started renovating the Life House in October.

Walter said he didn’t know he was preparing the home for medical workers until after a friend told him about Mitchell’s mission to protect her son on Wednesday. He then reached out Mitchell and gave her a place to stay for free.

“I told our partners at the Dream Center, ‘We have the vision for helping women in crisis. We have nurses who are in crisis right now who need a safe place to stay to avoid contacting loved one at risk.’” Walter said.

Mitchell was able to get a preview of what all the coronavirus can do before it started sweeping across the country because she has family members in Italy, where the disease has left people dying in hospital hallways because hospitals are overwhelmed. Then she started watching viral videos of nurses and doctors speaking out about low Personal protective equipment, also known as PPE, and not having enough ventilators. She’s read about how an ice-skating rink was transformed into a morgue in Spain and how the dead are being loaded into refrigerated trucks in New York City.

She keeps those images in mind when she feels the urge to hug or touch her child.

“I don’t want to be in one of those trucks. I don’t want my child to have to be on life support and I’m not even able to go visit them,” Mitchell said.

Getting a new place to stay eases her mind as she lives through what was the most frightening lesson in nursing school, which focused on how to prioritize which patients get help during an environmental disaster or pandemic. After semesters of being taught how to save everyone, Mitchell learned how to make hard decisions that aren’t based on a patient’s age, but a patient’s health.

“It doesn’t matter if you have a 4-year-old versus a 40 year old, if the 4-year-old has a ton of comorbidities and the 40 year old is totally healthy, you give the ventilator to the 40 year old,” Mitchell said. “To see one of the scariest things I learned in nursing school coming true literally the minute I graduate and I am on my own as a nurse is horrifying.”

Walter says he hopes to encourage more women in medical field through Recentered. The organization still has four free rooms left for medical workers. Since Recentered focuses on women in crisis, those who are interested must be female healthcare workers who are currently living with someone who is vulnerable to COVID-19. Walter can be contacted via email at recentered@gmail.com

“Just like sickness, negativity and fear can spread, hope and love spread as well and they are contagious in a way that encourages others,” he said. “When we receive love, we are able to give love. When we receive hope, we are able to give hope.”

It will be hard for Mitchell to live away from her son and to place him in the care of her boyfriend and her parents. But there hasn’t been a hardship they haven’t conquered together as mother and son. She’s watched her son endure medical procedure after medical procedure. She will endure this, too.

“This is our life. This what we have always known,” she said. “We are dealt the hand we are given, and we are going to make the best of it.”