'She Was Always There’: A Nurse Who Brightened The Hospital Ward Died Alone, Stricken By COVID-19

When there was a lull on the floor where she worked at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Lisa Ewald liked to fill it with dancing. In the small space set aside for nurses, she would bop around to a rap or R&B song, challenging her co-worker and friend Nina Townsend to a dance-off.

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She didn’t have any rhythm, and she didn’t care.

“I would tell her all the time, ‘You got the butt, but you don’t have no rhythm, girl,’ ” Townsend remembered. “She would just laugh.”

On and off the clock, Ewald was a force for fun. She was vibrant and sunny, with a try-anything attitude and a sense of humor that lightened shifts at the public hospital.

She made friends easily and held them close, becoming something like extended family in many of their lives. She delighted in trying new things: volunteering for an animal shelter, taking a cooking class, even going to a $9 spaghetti dinner hosted by the local VFW.

“I always say her middle name was Joy, and that really epitomized her as a person,” said Jessica Toth, one of her best friends. “She was bubbly — just somebody that loved life.”

Ewald died March 31, not long after finding out she had contracted the coronavirus. To friends and family, her death came as a cruel surprise, both needless and unfair.

She had said that she wasn’t allowed to wear a mask while caring for a patient who later tested positive for the virus; for several days afterward, she struggled to get access to a test. Hospital spokeswoman Brenda Craig said in a statement that the Henry Ford Health System has prioritized safety and testing of employees and worked diligently to provide masks and gowns. In the statement, the hospital said privacy rules prevent it from sharing details of patients’ deaths, “regardless of whether they were employees or not.”

In the end, the woman who had been so full of life died quietly and alone, just days before she would have turned 54.

“Never in a million years did I think that this would ever happen,” Toth said.

Ewald grew up in the Detroit area and spent most of her life there, leaving for South Carolina to attend college at Bob Jones University. Her parents favored the evangelical school because of its strict rules, she told friends; years later, her neighbor and friend Albert Fernandez would tease her about all the pop culture references she had missed.

“It was like she was from another planet,” he remembered, laughing. “You’d play something and she’d go, ‘Oh, I like that!’ ”

Ewald had thought about becoming a doctor before deciding to go into nursing, friends said. She did a stint as a traveling nurse before returning to Michigan to be near her mother, whom she considered a best friend.

She remained passionate about traveling, flying to Los Angeles and Miami and cruising Alaska and the Caribbean. She took Star Trek cruises and visited Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter. She was, friends said, a self-described nerd.

“We stayed on Universal property, and we got the front-of-the-line passes so that we could close out the park and open up the park,” recalled Roger Chow, one of her close friends. “I think she loved the whole experience.”

At her home in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Ewald took pride in growing cucumbers and tomatoes that she gave to friends. She carried treats in her pockets — “the really good ones, the expensive ones,” said Fernandez — to hand out to neighborhood dogs.

She was generous and dependable as a neighbor and as a friend.

“If you needed anything, she was always there,” Fernandez said. “And if she wasn’t, she would say, ‘I’m on my way.’ ”

Ewald liked helping people and saw nursing as a way to make a career of it. She always walked into Henry Ford with a smile, Townsend said.

“When I picture her, I remember her smiling,” she said.

But one March day, Ewald came home from work and told friends she had not been allowed to wear a mask while caring for a patient who later tested positive for the coronavirus. She was, Fernandez said, “scared to death.”

She texted Chow there were “not enough masks … deplorable” and she was sure she would contract the virus. She said the hospital would not test her until she showed symptoms.

Even after developing the telltale fever and coughing, Ewald had to wait two more days for a test. She got the results March 30: positive. The next day, she stopped responding to messages.

Fernandez and his wife used a spare key to check on her April 1. They found her sitting on the couch, lifeless.

“You just knew when you saw her,” Fernandez said.

Weeks later, her friends were still replaying her last days. They wondered whether a mask or an earlier test could have saved her — whether her death could have been prevented.

“I’m angry more than anything because she was such a good person, and she didn’t deserve this at all,” Toth said. “She was only 53. That following Saturday was her birthday. It’s just a life that was just taken too soon.”

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