Vanessa Landegger with her son, Dylan Antonioli. The two were classmates at the Yale School of Nursing until Landegger graduated on May 20. She enrolled in courses as a first-year medical student in Colorado in 2000, but soon found herself struggling to balance classes with raising her then 8-month-old son. She was away from extended family, sleep was hard to come by and her medical school’s facilities didn’t have accommodations for nursing mothers, she said.
“For me, anyway, it was a very welcome thing to have to put myself aside and really consider the needs of another person,” she said. At first, Landegger figured taking the course would help her handle emergency situations at the elementary school where she taught science. But months after she finished her training in 2019, the onset of theAt the same time, Antonioli, who was taking undergraduate classes at Georgetown University, came home when the school closed amid surging coronavirus cases. He and Landegger filled their time picking up EMT shifts in their town of New Canaan, Conn.