My View as a Nurse

On 12/2/2020 at 4:23 PM, Meagan Elaine Smith said:

For me, I found working as a nurse and being the front line to care for people with an unknown virus surreal. Regardless of nursing experience and years employed, we, as nurses, learned together how to manage the continuous evolving treatments and protocols within the hospital while sharing the fears of the unknown.

I know it's been said again and again, here and in mainstream media, but your words once again drive the point---->  All nurses and health care professionals making sacrifices to ease the suffering of our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers in this pandemic need to be recognized as heroes. Thank you @Meagan Elaine Smithfor your selflessness in your work and for sharing on allnurses®.  Have a wonderful Holiday.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience. I don't see a day coming when we will not be wearing masks at work, I think that in some ways COVID 19 has forever changed how we will be doing things in healthcare. It's been almost nine months since I held the hand of the first patient in our hospital that died of COVID 19 as he took his last (ventilator assisted) breaths. I can still remember every minute of his last three hours like it happened yesterday. He wife coming in to say goodbye through the glass, she was crying and thanking me, and for the first time in my career, I cried, and told her I was sorry. I sang songs with him, his wife and I had discussed his favorites, said some prayers (also discussed with his wife), and basically waited for his oxygen saturation level in the 50s to lead to his ultimate arrest. It was the worst day of my nursing career, not just because of the outcome but because we all wondered whether we had done the right thing. At the time, people that needed more than 5 liters oxygen by nasal cannula were intubated. Now we are keeping people alive on high flow nasal cannula, BiPAP, and other modalities. The patient had a challenging course and often times we wondered whether something else could be done. We were told not to be in patient's rooms more often than every four hours, and they were left alone, with everyone being scared. 

Fast forward to nine months later, I've facetimed families so they can say good bye to loved ones, I've done CPR in full PPE many times, rarely with success. (now all CPR is done in full PPE even for non COVID patients). Our overall patient population, COVID or not, seems to have gotten sicker. People that avoided the hospital for months stayed home until they were so sick they barely made it, and many didn't. We've had alcoholics that bleed out horrible deaths because they've been unemployed with nothing to do but drink. We've had clusters of contaminated heroin overdoses that appeared to be fentanyl or something else undetectable, but fatal. 

Didn't mean to highjack your thread, I was trying to relate that things have changed for everyone and you're right, we've had to adjust on fly. We're also working short staffed, most of us working 50+ hours per week. I know for myself, I couldn't do it with many people on the planet other than the ones I'm fortunate enough to work with. We are lucky to have chosen a profession that gives us the responsibility and opportunity to provide care for people facing the most difficult times in their lives. 

To nurses that have started over the course of the year it has certainly brought challenges no one could have anticipated. And while we don't know exactly what things will look like when we find the new normal, it will certainly be easier in many respects than what you've already experienced. Thank you to all my fellow nurses everywhere. Hospital, LTC, home care, outpatient, COVID patients or not, we're all in this together and our patients rely on us wherever we are providing their care.