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SPEAKER: I want you to meet someone, Jeanette Rupert. Jeanette is a nurse, and she is tough to keep up with. When she's not treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU at Methodist Hospital in Saint Louis Park, she's camped out at the medical tent in George Floyd Square or moving around the surrounding neighborhood giving free preventative care to members of Minneapolis's most medically vulnerable populations. Well, this month, reporter Catherine Richard and photographer Evan Frost caught up with Rupert in the hospital over the phone and one chilly December evening on a house call.

CATHARINE RICHERT: With a massive red medical bag slung over her shoulder, Jeanette Rupert knocks on the front door of Bob Hull's house. Hull, who Rupert calls uncle Bob, is recovering from heart surgery, and Rupert is here to check his blood pressure and his medications.

JEANETTE RUPERT: I want to see is there difference between you sitting and you standing because, remember when you were having those dizzy spells? Yes. OK.

CATHARINE RICHERT: Before Rupert leaves, Hall tells her she deserves a promotion.

JEANETTE RUPERT: Well, we're in a pandemic, uncle Bob. [LAUGHS]

BOB HULL: Well, duh, you need to be moving on up, you know?

JEANETTE RUPERT: I know. I know.

CATHARINE RICHERT: Rupert's easy laughter disguised as her physical and emotional exhaustion. Today, she's running on just a few hours of sleep after coming home from an overnight shift at the hospital preparing for a visitation for a friend who died and then heading out to do her volunteer work in George Floyd Square. This spot at the corner of 38th and Chicago in Minneapolis is the center of the neighborhood where Rupert grew up and where most of her extended family still lives.

And on May 25, it became the Nexus of two tragedies that have defined Rupert's year both as an ICU nurse and as a Black woman raising Black children in a world she worries remains stacked against them. Here, George Floyd was killed. And here, the pandemic continues to ravage Minnesota's communities of color.

JEANETTE RUPERT: Emotionally, it's been tough to see people of color dying in our ICU because we're also dying in the streets.

CATHARINE RICHERT: The statistics are stark. The state health department reports that Black Minnesotans have been twice as likely to test positive for the virus as white Minnesotans. They're more likely to land in the hospital and to die to vulnerabilities often compounded by underlying health conditions that are the byproducts of centuries-old structural racism in health care, in housing, in education, and in earning power. Those statistics haunt Rupert daily whether she's at the bedside of a dying COVID patient or manning the medical tent at 38th and Chicago. They haunt her because they are artifacts of problems so deep and so prolonged that they seem insurmountable.

JEANETTE RUPERT: We're also dying in a failed school system. We're also dying in a failed, failed health care system. We're also dying in a failed corporate America system. It's everywhere. And so it just breaks my heart when I'm seeing death to that magnitude for Black and Brown people when there's just so much against them already.

CATHARINE RICHERT: Rupert says she's the type of person who feels called to do certain things. And when she does, she goes all in, which helps explain her relentless schedule bouncing from home to work and to 38th and Chicago and back again. It's why she's a nurse in the first place. 10 years ago, she felt called to become an orthopedic nurse when her seven-year-old son was hit by a car and landed in the hospital. As she rushes breathlessly around Methodist Hospital one day, she explained she was inspired by the care her son received.

JEANETTE RUPERT: From then, I knew that I wanted to some way to be a part of the health care system and to give back. I just saw the incredible work they did with my son.

CATHARINE RICHERT: In the spring of 2020, as the pandemic was taking hold of the state, Rupert was called again, this time to work in the ICU. She visited the COVID unit one day. And after seeing people dying from this mysterious illness, her coworkers tired to their bones, she knew there was no going back.

JEANETTE RUPERT: When I saw the need my heart just-- there's that tug on your heart, that pull on your heart that said this is where you need to be. And in the middle of a pandemic, I switched to the ICU, and just here we are. [LAUGHS]

CATHARINE RICHERT: A few months later, the morning after Memorial Day, Rupert's brother called to tell her that a Black man had been killed by police the day before just yards from their childhood home. They rushed to the intersection 38th in Chicago.

JEANETTE RUPERT: I remember just tears flooding my eyes trying to understand what was going on. And it was like this is my home. This is my street. These are the people that I grew up with.

CATHARINE RICHERT: But amidst the growing chaos of the unrest that would envelop Minneapolis in coming days, Jeanette was drawn just as she was to the ICU to a makeshift tent dispensing medical care for anyone who needed it-- sunburns, bee stings, wounds.

JEANETTE RUPERT: I came back the next day and the next day and the next day, found myself coming after work, coming before work, donating supplies.

CATHARINE RICHERT: Throwing herself into this volunteer work was personal. And it wasn't just that George Floyd had died on the street she grew up on in the community that raised her, it was also about being a Black medical professional in a that may not be used to seeing Black medical professionals.

JEANETTE RUPERT: When I was younger, I didn't think I could be a nurse or a doctor. I didn't see that modeled for me or role modeled for me. So I knew that it was very important for them to see us in the health care profession because of the health care disparities that I'm aware of that are out there.

CATHARINE RICHERT: Through the summer, Rupert and her fellow volunteers leveraged their reputations as trusted medical providers to create a new nonprofit 612 MASH, which stands for Minneapolis All Shall Heal. The group provides basic medical aid and education in the community, like that blood pressure check at uncle Bob's place, the type of basic care that could, if it's consistent enough and widespread enough, prevent the type of underlying health conditions that have made people of color so susceptible to the worst of COVID-19. As Rupert reflects on what's changed for her in this turbulent year, she says the systemic racism laid bare in the COVID statistics or in George Floyd's death is nothing new. But watching these two events unfold simultaneously has given her a new lens on an old problem, one that has deepened her affection for her community.

JEANETTE RUPERT: So for me, it wasn't an awakening. It's something I live-- I live on a day-to-day basis. But it helped me value that my friends and family and my loved ones even more so.

CATHARINE RICHERT: She says that it's going home to her four children, her husband, and spending time in her faith where she finds all the stamina and strength she needs to continue this work. The time she spends with them is limited and precious.

JEANETTE RUPERT: With that, I fill up, and then I give. And then I come back home, and I fill up some more. And then I go out, and I give, so.

CATHARINE RICHERT: Rupert says she's hopeful for 2021 for date nights out with her husband, for a vaccine for the end to this pandemic. But a moment not too long ago in the COVID unit reminded her that her work at the intersection of health and racial justice is far from over.

JEANETTE RUPERT: We had a 28-year-old pass away, and that hit me. When I looked at the feeling of the death certificate, my heart just sunk. And I just said, "1992?"

And it was a person of color. It was challenging. I just said, we have to do something. We can't keep going this way. We can't keep going like this. We can't.

CATHARINE RICHERT: With reporting in Minneapolis from photographer Evan Frost, I'm Catharine Richert, NPR News.