I was just talking about this with my wife again yesterday. I showed her the stats right now and the kind of patients the floors were receiving and she said, “no wonder people are burning out; it’s a miracle they get any nurses at all.” And yes it’s true, for the education rate, the benefits and pay are good… But you earn every single penny knee-deep in literal c-diff shit and violent grannies and people drugged out. We lost a lot of good nurses over the course of the pandemic and I can’t blame them. For all the yellow ribbons slapped on suburbans during the 2000s for soldiers, where were the ribbons for healthcare workers? Oh right, laypeople exemplifying Dunning-Kruger and embracing conspiracy theories on a topic they know nothing about while my wife was pushing body bags into the morgue. Anti-vaxx folks with plummeting O2 stats and they and their family suddenly begging for the vaccine now. Too late.
Literally all of our seasoned lead nurses on the ICU units turned over to find a specialty less on the front-line after those days. Again, I don’t blame them. They basically went to war and came back without any support like a Vietnam vet. Just in normal circumstances, the shit these medical workers see is really striking… And in some ways dare I say it might be worse than soldiering because at least with that, there’s some level of separation between normalcy and the battlefield. Whereas with nursing, it’s this constant shock of going to work for 12 hours and 100% adrenaline (especially things like a trauma ER, OR, or ICU) — then come back and jump right back into parenting. Then rinse, repeat. Naturally death isn’t exactly on the line for you; but you’re still responsible for the lives of others.
What drove my wife away from the floors was the constant recycling of the same patients and not seeing the problems get better. The root problems of these people reside elsewhere in society and hospitals end up being the catch-all for mental and physical illness kicked under the rug.
I’m an ICU nurse, and that first year of Covid felt like a warzone. I guarantee it traumatized almost all of us; we still talk about it amongst ourselves as if referring to the “dark times” or something. I would love to never experience that again if I could… it was terrifying and I was coming home to my wife who is immunocompromised.
Constant uncertainty and overwhelming levels of people dying in amounts that you’re not ready for. In the first few months, people that were intubated (put on a ventilator, which we did quickly in the beginning) were effectively made a DNR. If they coded, we didn’t even try to resuscitate them because we didn’t have the protocols in place for performing advanced cpr, without infecting everyone
And it didn’t seem to care about their age. A healthy 30 year old dies; A 55 year old, grossly overweight patient with multiple comorbidities, walks out after a week. A marathon runner now needs a heart transplant. A 80 year old just has the sniffles… and then a massive stroke. It was unpredictable and awful to watch
My wife and I both had covid for the first time just earlier this year… we managed to avoid it this long at least, when it’s now not nearly as lethal (we were diligent and very lucky). So there’s that. But yeah, that stuff definitely fucked some nurses up. But we’re “healthcare heroes!” and sometimes get free pizza, so it’s all good, we continue forth regardless.
I’m just ranting now, and rarely talk about it anymore. But I feel like it’s good for people to still get an inside snippet sometimes. It’s almost impossible to put into words, as is. Shit was wild
Thank you for sharing. I know it’s tough to talk about. Even my wife whom I can at least tangentially relate to on medical grounds tends to bury the stuff when she comes home. Every single medical worker should have easy, free access to good therapy in my opinion. I have the utmost respect for front-line medical workers such as yourself.
Reading Carl Sagan’s somewhat dated albeit very relevant, “Demon Haunted World” right now, and all his fears have become fully realized. A complete disregard for science and this fringe pseudoscience and conspiracy-theory laden world. I don’t know how to stop what’s been set in motion.
We, with kids and what have you, caught COVID a couple of times unfortunately. If I recall we caught Delta and Omicron variants. The worst part about it was how much it just dragged on and on. I’ve never had that much fatigue. I had an infected kidney stone, early sepsis, pna, and pleural effusion at the same time and even all that wasn’t as draining and achy as covid pre-vaccine for 2 weeks…
