'I watched my co-workers develop PTSD,' kathryniveyy writes. 'COVID is a hoax until someone you love is lying motionless in a hospital bed, half dead, being kept alive by an angry nurse, a tired respiratory therapist and a depressed physician.'
To health care workers in the COVID era, holidays mean death, and we knew Omicron was coming before it had a name. The wave caused by this variant has barely begun, rapidly gathering steam, and we are exhausted, attempting to pull from reserves badly drained by earlier surges.
Eventually, that summer surge receded. By that, I mean that we occasionally had three or four open beds. My patients were all still sick, so sick. Many of them no longer had an active COVID infection, but their bodies had been so ravaged by the virus that they remained on breathing tubes as one organ system after another failed.
I lost count of how many times I heard my colleagues say the words “I don’t want to do this anymore.” I have been in various forms of media discussing the pandemic, and while negative comments were always there, my last 15 minutes of fame in August was by far the most contentious. I wrote a thread on Twitter chronicling my first year as a nurse during the pandemic, and it went viral. As the comments rolled in, I learned that I’m a fake, crisis actor. I’m getting paid to make COVID look worse than it is. I’m getting paid when my patients die. Just give them ivermectin.
I became a nurse because I want to help people. I don’t want to watch them die these horrible, preventable deaths, shift after shift and year after year. No health care worker does. Every time I speak publicly about COVID, it’s to beg people to listen to us so that they don’t have to learn the hard way, but the longer the pandemic drags on, the more I feel that I’m shouting into an abyss.
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