I'm almost embarrassed to post this... I am an ED nurse at a 450-bed hospital in the midwest. We have not been taxed by COVID patients yet. My wife has become somewhat of a conspiracy theorist and is questioning everything. She found a thread somewhere that convinced her that what we are seeing on TV is not really happening. We have had some serious arguments about this stuff, but she won't stop. She said that lots of nurses were reporting that nothing was happening at their hospitals.
I would like to see if any of the nurses from the hospitals that are being seriously affected are on this forum and can comment. I realize that most of you are probably too exhausted to even get on a forum.
You are very lucky then. I am also an ER nurse here in NY and things are ugly here.. our ER now is ICU/ER/MEDSURG because there is no enough room to put them in the units.. we already convert peds to adult and open up more rooms in the er just to accomodate overwhelming pt that rolls in everyday.. sometimes we have to take care of 15+ patients And on those 15 pt, 2-4 of them are intubated, there is no enough staff because nurses are getting sick too as well. we don’t even get breaks anymore. I also experience my 4 pt dying all at the same time and 3 codes at the same time.. we also have volunteer nurses who came from another state and on their first day of duty in our hospital, they cried because they didn't expect what was happening here in the city. just pray it never happens to your hospital because it is very heart breaking what was happening here in nyc ?
Thank you for sharing this. I'm not a nurse yet, but just trying to get started with nursing school in NYC this Summer as a NYC local hunkered down with my family in our apartment -- and the heartache of this city right now (not even as a brave soul working in the hospital) is unbearable at times. I'm so grateful for you guys keeping that light shining so I can join you all eventually. All the best to you.
It didn't make it clear; she is not a nurse and there are tons of people out there that are thinking just like her. The reason that I posted here is because we are getting into heated discussions about it every day. I believe it is happening, but she shows me a thread where tons of alleged nurses are posting that it is not happening at their hospital. So she thinks the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. It is so frustrating!
Could you please lay out the thought process?
I have been trying to figure this out, and maybe you can help.
When she sees the refrigerator trucks as morgues, does she think that is staged? Or does she think it is pretty normal to stack corpses in a truck designed for produce.
You have gotten answers that are both angry and sincere. Could you give us an understanding of what we are up against?
I believe your wife is delusional. Not as an insult. I looked it up to see if it was too strong a word. "characterized by or holding idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder."
I am wholly unqualified to diagnose a mental disorder, but the rest is spot on.
ICU nurse in a level 1 trauma center in the north east.
We converted 45 of our ICU beds (2 ICUs) to COVID ICUs. They are full of intubated/proned patients with ratios as crappy as 4:1. I've seen more death in the last month than I have in nearly 10 years of nursing combined.
Our morgue filled up last week so we had to call a refrigerated truck (luckily? NY did it first so our government had some ideas about how to handle the situation).
It's difficult for the public to understand because visitors and unnecessary personnel are banned from the hospitals and COVID units. We're legally bound not to discuss it with any details about where specifically we work per social media policies and general nondisclosures and HIPAA stuff.
The American public has too much time on their hands and POTUS is on TV for 2 hours a day contradicting public health officials at every turn.
If you're not seeing this first hand, it's a lovely vacation for you. If you ARE seeing this first hand, you're wondering how you'll process all your PTSD in 6 sessions or less of therapy, because that's all that your employer-sponsored health care covers. It might take me 6 sessions to wrap my head around the fact that grocers and gas station attendants have received a 2-5 dollar an hour hazard pay bump (they deserve it, but so do we), and I got a snack size bag of potato chips and 17 emails about policy changes that I'll have time to read sometime next year.
I cry on the way in to work every day now. I haven't cried about work since I was a new grad. I think the OP said he was in the midwest. Don't worry, you'll be seeing it soon. I saw the statistics about how many counties in rural areas either don't have a single ICU bed for the entire county, or have like, 6 ICU beds for several counties to share......you might be seeing it on your front lawn. Given how fast people go from looking somewhat normal to requiring urgent intubation (10 minutes sometimes)...we might not see the same case numbers because they don't have the same population or population density...but when the virus works its way there I don't even know that the shortage of vents will be the issue, people will die at home or on the way to the hospital. I mean, I honestly hope that doesn't happen, because I'm not a garbage human, but given what I'm seeing lately I'm not terribly optimistic.
Oh, and someone mentioned 'do they have co-morbids?'
Yes. We all do. It's called being an American. We lead a sedentary lifestyle, the VAST majority of us are overweight or obese, everyone drinks and smokes and does drugs like it's still 1995 even though most of them don't admit it, and we have ZERO healthy coping skills.
We are also seeing healthy-appearing individuals requiring 3 weeks of mechanical ventilation, but mostly we're just seeing how unhealthy this great nation really is.
Good grief. To all who are replying to this poor nurse with ad hominem arguments against his wife, could you just stop already?
Instead of attacking her character, his character, her mental health, etc., just answer his question. They are obviously not in a big metropolitan area and we all as Americans just went through a presidential election cycle where Fake News was the biggest issue. Relax. We are all in this together and to be aggressively berating this man is just unconscionable.
Nah. They kind of can't stop. They basically have PTSD. Imagine if in 2004 you went on a forum of soldiers online and asked if war in the middle east was real or just a media hoax?
Maybe in 10 years when we've had therapy, naps, and time...we'll all be able to come up with something really diplomatic and kind to say when someone on the internet 2,000 miles away wants to know if the news is lying, in full, about over 20,000 Americans dying horrible, painful deaths while we watched at close range and tried to provide comfort while every square inch of our skin and faces were covered, or while we couldn't get there in time because of a 20 minute 'donning and doffing' procedure that some genius in an office came up with.
Good grief. To all who are replying to this poor nurse with ad hominem arguments against his wife, could you just stop already?
Instead of attacking her character, his character, her mental health, etc., just answer his question. They are obviously not in a big metropolitan area and we all as Americans just went through a presidential election cycle where Fake News was the biggest issue. Relax. We are all in this together and to be aggressively berating this man is just unconscionable.
“Relax.”
I just can’t with this statement.
“We are all in this together.”
The OPs wife surely doesn’t believe so; her actions do not demonstrate this.
”... To be aggressively berating this man is just unconscionable.”
Unconscionable. I think the pp who stated PTSD is correct. How health care workers, their families, patients, and patients families are being treated - that’s unconscionable. Lack of PPE, lack of ventilators, people dying without a loved one by their side - that’s unconscionable. That the federal government knew since late January yet very little was done? That’s unconscionable.
Most of us on this forum keep waking up, going to work KNOWING how it is - we are not martyrs. Just people.
And then to be told not to become upset and just tell our stories, “what’s it really like, because my wife and my friends don’t believe it.”
I am an ICU nurse in a large community hospital in the Mid Atlantic region. We have well exceeded our normal ICU capacity. Right now, I'd say super sick covid19 patients have roughly doubled our normal ICU caseload, and a large number of ICU patients are being taken care of outside of our normal ICU environments. That's mostly just the covid19 patients who need ventilators. There are a ton of covid19 patients out on the floors who need monitoring and O2 (and often a lot of O2, more than the floors can normally administer) who haven't taken up an ICU bed yet. And surely plenty more at home feeling pretty ill but not meeting criteria for hospital admission.
I'm not a bot or a government tool. I've posted here often enough about ICU stuff and nursing in general for years before this.
This kind of malarkey is such a slap in the face to the patients, families, and frontline staff who are experiencing utter devastation.
Yes, the >26,000 deceased in the U.S. were real people. They had real parents, spouses, siblings, children and friends. They had real values, interests, and hobbies. The nurses who cared for them are real live humans, many of whom will never be the same because they are experiencing repeated traumas on a daily basis. The bodies in the morgues and being buried in temporary sites are actual human bodies.
This is just total crap, and for you to even humor your wife and think this is worth further discussion is shameful.
Apparently your wife can read. Has she read about the holocaust? Does she believe it existed? In my mom's teaching career, she had multiple international students deny its existence. They weren't there, and someone told them it was a world-wide conspiracy of fake stories and fake photos and fake survivors and fake discoveries at the sites and fake heartache... When, from the dawn of time, has the entire world joined together in a mega conspiracy that benefits no one and harms millions? Never!
I've never cared for a patient who died of a shark attack. I've never personally seen a shark on my trips to the beach. That doesn't mean "fake news" and that no one has died of a shark attack.
Because your wife can read the internet, she should also be able to comprehend the articles explaining how different regions will peak at different times, how rural vs urban areas will be differently affected by lifestyle, how social distancing in some areas has been more effective than others. She should understand that this early in the pandemic, of course there are some facilities in this massive country that don't have COVID+ patients yet.
QUIT HUMORING YOUR WIFE! You'd be doing her a better favor if you enrolled her in courses about recognizing legitimate sources and logic. Ugh.
These are REAL PEOPLE with REAL FAMILIES who didn't get to say goodbye.
And to answer your question, yes, it is in local hospitals. Yes, nurses really are being told to stretch single-use PPE for a week. Yes, I have nurse and doctor friends who are caring for these patients. Yes, people who seem stable are coding. Yes, we have quarantined paramedics and firemen in town who tested positive. Yes, the doctors and nurses who died after their exposures really did die, not enter the witness protection program.
I work a large hospital in Boston, MA as a travel nurse. I have been on a surgical unit in said hospital since the beginning of February. It is no longer a surgical unit. It has been converted to a COVID unit. It is as bad as they say. On my last shift they talked about keeping our yellow gowns on while going between positive patients rooms as to conserve them. We have transferred a ton of people to the ICU because they were tanking. Some of the nurses have been redeployed to the ICU’s because they don’t have enough nurses. Mind you most of those redeployed have never worked in an ICU. They received a 4 hour training and then a 4 hour shadow. Nothing about that is OK. Nothing about this is fake. People are delusional if they think it is.
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oneday_nursepoundcake
94 Posts
Thank you for sharing this. I'm not a nurse yet, but just trying to get started with nursing school in NYC this Summer as a NYC local hunkered down with my family in our apartment -- and the heartache of this city right now (not even as a brave soul working in the hospital) is unbearable at times. I'm so grateful for you guys keeping that light shining so I can join you all eventually. All the best to you.