Coming home at the end of the day is not necessarily a comfort if there’s a risk of exposing a family or household member to COVID-19. That’s where family physician Dr. Dayna Ferguson found himself, working in the emergency room at Monadnock Community Hospital a couple weeks ago. In a turn of events befitting the strangeness of the times, he is now sleeping in a studio normally reserved for the world’s most promising writers at Peterborough’s MacDowell Colony.
“I have four children and my oldest daughter was really sick in January,” he said, with necrotizing pneumonia and other complications. She’d been badly sick before, and Ferguson suspected she could be immunocompromised, and therefore more vulnerable to COVID-19. Luckily for him, the MacDowell Colony and the Barbara C. Harris Center in Greenfield have both offered their facilities as emergency housing for medical professionals, in order to protect families like Ferguson’s.