Last night I read that the CDC is planning to transport at least one American Citizen with the ebola virus to Atlanta for treatment. Driving around today my car radio kept assaulting me with experts soothingly asserting that there is no reason for the American population to fear exposure to the virus. To a man they all went on to say that only healthcare workers were likely to be exposed.
If you're a healthcare worker raise your hand. Are you angry? Do you feel like you're being considered expendable? Less than fully human? Are you worried?
I don't favor deliberately bringing ANY known infected person across the ocean to this continent. OK, Ebola is not all that easy to contract. It's a lot harder to contract if it is thousands of miles away.
The virus is spread by contact with infected body fluids. So lets say a nurses aid in a hospital comes in contact with those body fluids (diarrhea, emesis, blood, whatever. Accidents happen even if you take precautions.) What is to stop her from spreading the virus to her husband or child? What is to stop a child infected in this way from spreading it within his classroom?
I have always been able to deal with the concept of ebola by reminding myself that it exists on another continent. Perhaps I'm being selfish, but I believe that anyone sickened in Africa should be treated in Africa. We don't need to help diseases spread around the globe any more than we already do.
NIMBY. In this case, NIMBY. I'm not a NIMBY kind of girl, but this terrifies me.
What do you think? What would you do if you were assigned a patient know to be infected with Ebola?
I just want to clarify that the only thing that really makes me angry about all of this is the media portrayal of healthcare workers as expendable. "Healthcare workers" doesn't just refer to nurses. It's all the doctors and aides, and janitors and secretaries, and the folks in medical records, and the allied health folks. Loads and loads of people. Loads and loads of hard working, upstanding people who make hospitals run. They are not expendable to their families, friends, communities or hospitals.
Everyone who has ever worked in healthcare knows that there will be days when you end up wearing someones' vomit. I just hope that doesn't happen in an isolation unit housing an ebola patient. The idea of it scares me. And yes, I'm also worried about travelers pretending to be well enough to travel and bringing back unwelcome souveniers. I'm also worried about TB patients who don't finish their medication, and that dude with resistant TB who flew to Italy for his own wedding even though his doctors told him not to.
I admit it - infectious disease is not my thing. I love traumas and psych disorders and strokes and a whole mess of other things. Infectious diseases - not so much.
Your mileage may vary. It takes all kinds to make a world.
I just want to clarify that the only thing that really makes me angry about all of this is the media portrayal of healthcare workers as expendable. "Healthcare workers" doesn't just refer to nurses. It's all the doctors and aides, and janitors and secretaries, and the folks in medical records, and the allied health folks. Loads and loads of people. Loads and loads of hard working, upstanding people who make hospitals run. They are not expendable to their families, friends, communities or hospitals.
Everyone who has ever worked in healthcare knows that there will be days when you end up wearing someones' vomit. I just hope that doesn't happen in an isolation unit housing an ebola patient. The idea of it scares me. And yes, I'm also worried about travelers pretending to be well enough to travel and bringing back unwelcome souveniers. I'm also worried about TB patients who don't finish their medication, and that dude with resistant TB who flew to Italy for his own wedding even though his doctors told him not to.
I admit it - infectious disease is not my thing. I love traumas and psych disorders and strokes and a whole mess of other things. Infectious diseases - not so much.
Your mileage may vary. It takes all kinds to make a world.
I don't think that's the media's portrayal of us at all. It's a simple fact. There is virtually no risk to the general public. And I honestly doubt the folks in medical records are going to be coming into contact with either of these people's bodily fluids.
So because infectious diseases are "not your thing", that means that US citizens who were unfortunate enough to contract this disease are undeserving of the medical care that we have the ability to provide? I travel internationally all the time and, in the back of my mind, I always have a plan of where I would medically evacuate to if necessary. Just because I choose to go to Africa, that doesn't mean that I give up my right to the medical care THAT I PAY FOR.
Specializes in Oncology; medical specialty website.
We are all expendable...the government says so that's why money talks...if you have money you will get treatment for the worst diseases..donate big bucks to a hospital and your in ... Your a VIP...look at Magic Johnson the longest living HIV pt in the world..social security won't last for my age group so what better way to get rid of a few than to bring a deadly virus back and kill off a few folk...and not to mention they are making history by treating the first US case...
Let me guess...you believe the government faked the moon landing too, don't you?
I travel internationally all the time and, in the back of my mind, I always have a plan of where I would medically evacuate to if necessary. Just because I choose to go to Africa, that doesn't mean that I give up my right to the medical care THAT I PAY FOR.
I travel internationally as well, and I understand the risks associated with doing so.
I just want to make a comment about the nurses who are criticizing those who would refuse to treat someone with this disease. It's all fine and dandy to post on a public forum that YOU would do it with that smug sense of superiority that I can read between the lines of your posts. However, if and when the time comes and you actually are faced with the reality of this disease and having to take care of people who have it I wonder how many of you would actually live by your words that you've posted here. You can sit and say that there's no real health concern because it's not airborne and it's easy to puff yourself up and give a lecture on it to others because you feel nurses should be martyrs and treat everyone regardless of the situation. Their fears are real and I don't know why there is so much condescending superiority here.
It's all a moot point since we are all anonymous here and are unable to see who all these saintly people really are and if they would do what they say they would do.
Count me as one who is not impressed by the hysteria.
Part of the issue is that the media has turned into the person (organization) who has cried wolf far too many times. At this point, I don't know what is a serious issue and what is just more media hype--i.e., trying to scare us to improve ratings.
As an unrelated example--I recently went on the Weather Channel website, and the headline was "87 Million at Risk!!!" over the top of a map of the US covered with scary colors. When I clicked on the headline, the story was that a typhoon in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific posed a small risk to SE Asia. While this is nothing to be taken lightly (especially for those in SE Asia) it just showed the ridiculousness of media hysteria just so we will keep going to that site.
Today, the headline on CNN's website said something to the effect of "Dr. Gupta predicts Ebola will be a world wide disease." Maybe it will be. I don't try to pretend I'm smarter than Dr. Gupta. However, at this point, I can't believe that this headline was not meant to do anything other than generate buzz for the site, rather than actually present the truths of what risks really do exist.
I travel internationally as well, and I understand the risks associated with doing so.
As do I, which is why I purchase travel insurance that will cover the cost of medical repatriation if necessary. If I get sick while abroad, especially in the developing world, I'm coming back to the US as fast as possible. I pay a lot of money for my health insurance and I'll use rather than dying abroad any day.
As do I, which is why I purchase travel insurance that will cover the cost of medical repatriation if necessary. If I get sick while abroad, especially in the developing world, I'm coming back to the US as fast as possible. I pay a lot of money for my health insurance and I'll use rather than dying abroad any day.
Which is all fine and dandy for you, but many travel insurance companies won't cover you if you fly to Nigeria and contract Ebola, because it's foreseeable. The workers in this case knowingly took a foreseeable risk. Totally different from going to Latin America and having a heart attack or going to Southeast Asia and being in a motor vehicle accident.
I didn't read all the responses, so apologies if I'm repeating anything someone else said, but if ebola does make an appearance in the general public of the US, it won't be from those Americans they brought back who have been under quarantine. Those would be the ones I'm least concerned about, and I have no issue at all with them being brought back for better treatment.
What concerns me is people unknowingly carrying the virus into the US. These are the ones that would affect us as healthcare workers nationwide, not the quarantined doctors in Atlanta. The way I see it though, these are the risks we knowingly took on when we becomes nurses. Sure, we may not have thought specifically about ebola, but I have many times thought about the possibility of some pandemic and that I would have to be one of the people on the frontline fighting it, locally anyway. I tend to believe though that if ebola makes an appearance in the public we would be able to isolate and control it much more quickly than any third world country would, and it would never become a wide scale problem.
Also, I don't see the media as really portraying healthcare workers as expendable, I think they're just stating the obvious. We are the people that chose to make our living dealing with sick people. It comes with the territory.
So to put it bluntly: this is what you signed up for. No one promised that you would never get stuck by an HIV patient's dirty needle. No one promised there would never be some mass infectious disease (ebola or otherwise) spreading across the country.
Nowhere in my list of career expectations was cleaning up an Ebola patient ever an option.
I also believe it's mighty easy to SAY what you'd do in the event you were being pushed into the room of someone with a 100% fatal disease if ANY exposure occurs....but do you really know? And do we really know all of you would be right there to jump into that room in our place?
There is some measure of human nature that urges some to give themselves a martyr's appearance by claiming they'd throw themselves on every grenade to save the sick.
Sorry, I do have my doubts. And I firmly believe I'm being much more honest than some others here.
First of all, did you really expect our nursing educators to sit down give you a huge list of all the possible diseases you MIGHT be exposed to in your career as a nurse? Of course not, but if you thought realistically about what patient care entails surely you were aware that there's absolutely no way to predict what you might have to deal with. It's just a little naive to act surprised or angry, but I guess a lot of people are........
Secondly, ebola has about a 60% fatality rate. Which is still no joke, but don't say 100%, it's just not true.
Lastly, I'm one of "those" nurses who would be willing to treat a known ebola patient, given necessary quarantine, of course. Not because of some delusional martyrdom, but because I was realistic about what my job might entail when I went into nursing. It's 2014, there's no telling what we're all going to see in our lifetime, from EMP's (as discussed on another thread) to brand new, genetically engineered, ruthless diseases no one's ever even heard of. Hope for the best, be ready for the worst.
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Raviepoo
318 Posts
I just want to clarify that the only thing that really makes me angry about all of this is the media portrayal of healthcare workers as expendable. "Healthcare workers" doesn't just refer to nurses. It's all the doctors and aides, and janitors and secretaries, and the folks in medical records, and the allied health folks. Loads and loads of people. Loads and loads of hard working, upstanding people who make hospitals run. They are not expendable to their families, friends, communities or hospitals.
Everyone who has ever worked in healthcare knows that there will be days when you end up wearing someones' vomit. I just hope that doesn't happen in an isolation unit housing an ebola patient. The idea of it scares me. And yes, I'm also worried about travelers pretending to be well enough to travel and bringing back unwelcome souveniers. I'm also worried about TB patients who don't finish their medication, and that dude with resistant TB who flew to Italy for his own wedding even though his doctors told him not to.
I admit it - infectious disease is not my thing. I love traumas and psych disorders and strokes and a whole mess of other things. Infectious diseases - not so much.
Your mileage may vary. It takes all kinds to make a world.