Just talking about the message, he started crying.

It was his first day off in weeks. He had taken advantage of the off day to — no, not wander the streets of Manhattan — rent a car and drive to a Walmart in New Jersey, where he could buy himself some Cokes.

“They have the weirdest laws up here,” said Todd Maxwell. “You can’t put a soda machine next to a snack machine. Just the weirdest laws.”

Maxwell is a nurse from Byhalia, Mississippi. When the pandemic hit New York, he left his job in Jackson, Tennessee, to fly up and work in a hospital dedicated to COVID-19 patients.

He has seen misery and miracles in the month he has been away. He has seen recovery and death. And he talked about it all without so much as a tremor in his voice until he got to that message.

“It’s from my daughter, Emma,” he said. “She’s 12.”

And then he read me the message. And I’ll share it with you in a bit. But first, let me tell you some things about Maxwell himself.

He wanted to be a doctor. He grew up in Munford, attended the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and took the courses required to apply to medical school.

“Then my girlfriend got pregnant,” he said. “We got married. And I had to go to work. It takes too long to get through medical school and an internship and residency and all that. So I became a nurse.”

Maxwell is proud of the work he has done as a nurse. He’s married — well, re-married — to a nurse. Two of his seven kids are nurses. Another is in nursing school.

But through the years, Maxwell has also grappled with the notion that he somehow shortchanged himself. It doesn’t help that these days nurses are too often treated — these are Maxwell’s words — “like glorified pill pushers.”

“I always wanted to do something important,” Maxwell said. “My whole life, I wanted to do something special, something incredible. At one point, I volunteered to serve in the Middle East but was told I was too old. Now I’m 55. I wasn’t sure how many more chances I’d have. ”

So when Maxwell saw the call for nurses to help out in New York, he responded instantly. Never mind that he still has kids at home, including 12-year-old twins.

“My wife knew how I felt about it,” he said. “Being a nurse herself, she understood.”

Maxwell signed on for a 21-day initial stint. He had no idea what he’d be asked to do. He was given a room in the Park Central Hotel in downtown Manhattan, where he waited to hear what came next.

“I ended up at Roosevelt Island Medical Center,” he said. “It’s a hospital that was built in 1842 but had been closed for years. They opened it up just for COVID patients. I walked into a completely empty hospital. There was nothing. There were no beds, there were no computers, there was nothing. So I started making recommendations how to put the beds in just right, how to make the oxygen work. We got the best equipment — everything state-of-the-art, brand new — and I just started going to work.”

Maxwell was put in charge of two wards in the new hospital. Then the patients started to flood in. Maxwell started writing a daily diary on Facebook, as much as a therapeutic exercise as anything else. Some excerpts:

Day 6: “Seems like I’ve been here forever. We are working 13-16-hour days every day.”

Day 7: “Today was utter chaos. 20 admissions of COVID clients to a unit not even remotely capable of admitting one patient. Supplies are short and difficult to come by.”

Day 8: “Another grueling day. ... Can’t violate HIPAA here but for the first time I was faced with a client doubting God and why this happened.”

Day 9: “Today was an extremely hazardous day to be a nurse. We had three nurses leave yesterday.”

Day 17: “Our problem now is when it’s time for patients to go home the family doesn’t want them around. I can’t possibly put my mind around this.”

Day 18: “Will it ever stop? We lost three more patients today.” 

Day 21: “We started today on a very sad note. We were informed that a nurse who came with us and contracted the virus within the first few days passed away last night.”

Day 24: “Patients are still arriving every day. As fast as we discharge, someone else is waiting on a bed.”

The entries are exhausting, just to read. But as more and more people read them — as they were forwarded around — notes and packages started arriving at the Park Central Hotel, as a way of thanking Maxwell and his colleagues.

“I started getting them every day,” Maxwell said. “A lot of times, it’s from people I don’t even know. There’s a church group in Memphis that made all the nurses’ cloth masks. Someone in Hawaii sent me some stuff. The town of Byhalia has really stepped up, they sent me three packages last week.”

People have sent Maxwell Pop Tarts, peanut butter crackers and Rice Krispie treats. They’ve sent a coffee pot, Mountain Dew and magazines (because the patients don’t have TVs).

Every night, Maxwell returns to the hotel after a long day of work. He walks to the ballroom, which has turned into a makeshift mailroom for the time being.

“They have big letters on the wall,” he said. “You look for your last name and see if anything is there. Now, there’s a box nearly every day.”

It’s not just the contents of those boxes that matter to Maxwell. It’s what the boxes represent.

“I feel like people are appreciating nurses,” he said. “They appreciate what we’re willing to do. Nurses have been kind of taken for granted for a long time. Now, everywhere we go, people are thanking us.”

Maxwell doesn’t have any illusions that this will last forever. He remembers that people once vowed to be nicer to each other — and nicer to first responders — after 9-11. How long did that last?

“I’m sure when everything reopens people will go back to their same old ways,” he said. “But that’s OK. Now, I know I did what I became a nurse to do. I made a difference in a lot of people’s lives.”

And there is one note that will stay with him long after this is over. It’s the one from his 12-year-old daughter, Emma, that he opened during his day off.

It’s a illustration of three nurses, walking down the hall of a hospital. Superman, Batman, Hulk, Captain America and all the rest of the superheroes are bowing as the nurses pass.

”She wrote a note underneath it,” Maxwell said. “It says, `My hero.’

“For a dad, it doesn’t get any better than that.”