Home Health As A Healthcare Worker During The Pandemic, Here’s What I Want You...

As A Healthcare Worker During The Pandemic, Here’s What I Want You To Know

In 2020, everyone around the world stood together in support of healthcare workers who were viciously fighting a virus that we knew very little about. Fast forward to a year later, and we’re alone. Healthcare workers everywhere are begging for anyone to listen. We’re used to being the advocates for the voiceless. But what good does it bring when someone turns their back and accuses us of not doing enough?

What more can you expect a nurse, doctor, or respiratory therapist to do for an intubated patient who shouldn’t have gotten to this point? They’re connected to multiple lines of medication that will not save their life. Instead, those can only prolong it while families cry and beg us to save them. On the other hand, the ones who make it through have lifelong repercussions. In fact, many come back months later with new symptoms of some other comorbidity that has developed. 

For the ones who don’t make it, it’s almost a “blessing” not to be hooked up to machines. They’re no longer isolated from everyone, only able to interact with the staff that gowns up in suits and equipment that makes us feel like aliens. No longer are they crying or being incoherent while trying to FaceTime their family members because there is no other way for them to see their loved ones.

Whether you’re healthy or not, COVID-19 is killing people.

If you get sick and come in quickly, we’re able to treat you faster. We can even get you back on your feet within a few days to weeks. I work on a step-down ICU unit where we take patients on high amounts of oxygen twenty-four/seven. Here, our fear is that they won’t be able to sustain a decent stat on the oxygen, and they will be intubated, not coming back alive. For the past eighteen months, I have seen it happen. The patients I see for weeks on end — who I’ve grown close to and work so hard for — end up with their oxygen dropping and feeling like they’re drowning. The patients who start to get better, and then somewhere along the way, give up entirely.

We are their cheerleaders. We push them to do the things we know work to help strengthen their bodies while they lie in bed. It hurts to know they can’t be at home for holidays or birthdays. It hurts when you find out the spouse is also on the unit or in the hospital with COVID-19 and can’t talk to one another. Families and friends are being torn apart. And that’s not even touching the surface of those of us who are desperately working on trying to save them.

I became a nurse to save people and to make a difference; not to check for pulses on the lifeless and put them in body bags for the morgue to pick up.

I don’t want to be the last face a patient sees before they pass because they decided not to get a shot, or someone around them didn’t. I don’t want to be yelled at or assaulted within my profession because we are “making” up this entire thing and just looking for a “sympathy card.” If anyone came and shadowed me for even an hour at my job, I guarantee your opinion would change instantly.

We are tired. We’re burnt out and expected to put in more than we can give. People are leaving healthcare because of the number of people who don’t give a damn about us. We’re replaceable is what we’re told, but it’s not true. Shortages are everywhere, and suicide within our system is increasing. No one can truly understand how we feel when they’re not there, and we don’t expect them to. Instead, we just ask that you listen and help us in whatever small ways you can.

If you have a friend or family member working directly with COVID-19 patients, please reach out to them. It means more to us than anything when someone cares enough to just check in and see how we’re processing everything. We just need to know that someone is there to support us while we fight. Otherwise, this virus will win, and healthcare will never be the same once we leave.

Featured image via Luke Jones on Unsplash

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