After she and her colleagues battle COVID-19 during the day, Rachel comes home and sews surgical masks at night. Dwindling supplies are prompting these desperate measures.

Last Wednesday night, my younger sister asked me to overnight her three dozen vacuum cleaner bags. A neurosurgeon, Rachel was worried about the dwindling supply of surgical face masks at her hospital. She’d been told to do her rounds without a mask, to save precious supplies for health-care workers in the emergency department and Intensive Care Unit providing direct care to COVID-19 patients.

Frustrated that this would put the lives of her patients at risk because as a young woman she could be an asymptomatic COVID-19 carrier, Rachel did what any respectable woman would under the circumstances: she decided to make her own.

Rachel has been quilting since she was young. When she left her initial career in nursing to pursue her dream of becoming a neurosurgeon, she found more skill overlap from the things our grandmother taught us than she had anticipated.

Her sutures are elegant. Her ability to artfully piece things together has carried her from being a homeschool girl at a sewing machine to saving lives as a neurosurgeon at the operating table. To our knowledge, she is the only homeschooled woman among America’s approximately 5,000 neurosurgeons.

But now, during her third year of residency at an urban hospital in Detroit, she finds herself returning to the sewing machine again. After she and her colleagues battle COVID-19 during the day, Rachel comes home and sews surgical masks at night.

These homemade masks are not adequate protection for health-care workers. Quickly dwindling supplies of medical protective gear, like N95 masks, mean U.S. health-care workers must resort to desperate measures to reduce their chances of becoming sick.

After a few tries, Rachel perfected her prototype. She used simple materials: a 7.5” x 20” strip of fabric and shoelaces, and her sewing machine for a solution that can be sterilized and reused when she makes her rounds. She cuts pieces of the vacuum cleaner bag and inserts them into the mask to provide a more protective filter against contagions.

My sister is modeling scrappiness in the face of a crisis, but Rachel should not have to be making her own masks. This is America, land of abundance and ingenuity. We should be protecting our front lines, our first responders in the medical field, by arming them with adequate supplies for the long fight ahead.

Doctors should be able go home and sleep instead of making their own supplies. All across our country, hospitals are sharing their preferred sewing patterns for homemade masks and putting out calls for donations. Hopefully President Trump will soon avail himself of the full extent of his powers under the Defense Production Act and shortly, our health-care workers have adequate protective gear, so that my sister does not have to sew these far less protective, homemade masks for herself and colleagues in between her shifts.

If you have any spare N95 masks, sterile gloves, or hand sanitizer that you can donate to your local hospital, this is helpful to our national effort, too. Once you’ve committed to staying home, if you want to contribute further by making masks of your own and donating them to your local hospital, here’s her “recipe.”

Rachel’s Improvised Personal Protective Equipment

Ingredients

One-quarter yard of soft fabric that won’t bleed if bleached (cotton recommended, knits discouraged)

20 or so inches of shoelaces or other material to fasten the mask around the ears or the back of the head

All-purpose polyester thread to match fabric

Pipe cleaners, cut to 4-inch pieces

Oreck XL microfilter vacuum cleaner bags (or any high-quality filtration vacuum cleaner bag), cut into 6” x 9” rectangles

Sewing machine

Iron and ironing board

Tequila, optional (Rachel’s favorite is Patron Silver)

Directions