My Covid Story by Brittany S.
Before COVID, I loved my job. Every day was new and exciting. I was always learning new things and I felt a sense of pride in what I did. I cared for sick people and their families and helped them get better. Sometimes they wouldn’t get better, and I would help give them a pain free, dignified death.
When COVID came, I know I would be a part of history and was excited to do my part. I was scared, there wasn’t much data and so many people were dying including health care workers.
March 19, 2020, was the first day I ever cared for a covid patient. There were enough cases that by the end of the day, I had to move my patient to another unit that would be opened as the designated covid unit.
I packed my patient up and took him down to the new room. When I got there, there was no help. The 2 other nurses were in another room coding their patient and next door they were intubating a patient. When a patient “codes” it means they do not have a heartbeat. This is when we start CPR, push lifesaving medication, do procedures at bedside as needed and put our heads together as clinicians to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. A code usually requires at least 10 people to run effectively, there were only 3 present here. In the next room, they were intubating which means they were placing a breathing tube and putting this patient on a ventilator. Again, this is a dangerous procedure that requires a lot of set up, medication, skill and coordination between a team of 4-5 clinicians. In this room, there were only 3 people. Both rooms were running high stress situations without the resources needed. Moving an ICU patient also requires a team of people to manage the medications, lines and tubes and to monitor the patient’s vitals. It was only me and the respiratory therapist, who left as soon as we arrived. I was on my own to settle this patient into a new room, which usually requires 1-2 other nurses to help.
In order to protect ourselves before going into a covid room, we would put on a gown, gloves, goggles, an N95 mask, a face shield and a hair covering. This took minutes, so once you went in the room it was best not to come out until you finished everything you needed to do. If you forgot something, you had to hope someone was at the nursing station to grab it for you so you didn’t have to leave your unstable patient and go through the donning process again. If someone was able to help you, they’d slip what you asked for through the door quickly, careful not to let any covid particles out of the room.
As mentioned above, the other nurses on the unit were coding and intubating, both procedures that are very high stress, lengthy and require a lot of manpower so I knew I had no one to help me.
When I arrived at the new room with my patient, he started having a seizure and became unstable. Normally, I’d call the doctors and yell for help from the nurses, but no one was available. I was alone and afraid my patient was going to die before I could get him the help he needed I wondered if all this exposure would also take my life. For the first time in my career, I cried in my patient’s room, completely overwhelmed. I stepped out of the room, took off my PPE, washed my hands and called a doctor who was a friend of mine, and I knew was in the hospital. He gave me verbal orders to help this patient and he told me he was on his way to come help. I grabbed the meds and supplies I needed and redonned my PPE. After what felt like an eternity, I got back in the room to stabilize my patient.
By the end of the shift, the patient coding had died. All 4 of us nurses working that unit walked out together in complete silence, minds racing as we processed what we just experienced.
Is this what it would be like? All day, every patient unstable, without enough staff to help.
That had been the report of what was happening in New York. Were we all going to get sick and maybe die? We stopped in the hallway, looked at each other and fell to the ground crying, holding each other.
The rest of the night is a blur. I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember the rest of my walk out of the hospital, driving home or how I spent the night. I don’t remember what I told Cam when I got home.
I had to be back at work the next day and I do remember volunteering to go back to the COVID unit to take my patient I had the day before. I had already been exposed and didn’t want my more susceptible coworkers to be exposed unnecessarily. That’s all I remember from that day, I don’t remember any part of work. As I write this, I realize I have a lot of memories and experiences I can’t recall.
Every day that I went to work, I had a new anxiety about what was going to happen and if I would have what I needed to take care of my patients. I never had worry about work before, I loved the challenge of not knowing what I was walking into every day. This unit that we designated for covid had been abandoned for over a year, all the computers, monitors and supplies had been ripped out. There had been a skeleton unit put back together very quickly, but so many important supplies and pieces of equipment were missing. Things we needed to do our jobs, as simple as syringes to give medicine and ultrasound machines to place IV’s. It was taking us two to three times longer to get things done than they normally would. The charge nurse would have to make trips up to the regular ICU’s and pillage their storage rooms for supplies we needed.
As charge, my role is to staff the unit and provide support to the nurses. On a normal day in the ICU, there may be 2 or 3 emergent situations that I would help with. Help stabilize the patient and then continue checking on other people and patients. With COVID, there were often 2 or 3 emergent situations happening at one time. And this would happen all day. I would go from one fire to another and would get calls constantly from nurses needing help stabilizing their patient. I’m only one person, I couldn’t be everywhere at once. I knew that But I felt like I was letting my staff down when I had to choose who I was going to help. I felt like I ran around like a crazy person from one disaster to another, just barely getting things under control and then running to the next place I was needed. Me and my coworkers were under a constant state of stress all day every day and if our patients were stable, the nurse’s patients next to us wasn’t. We didn’t eat and didn’t drink water all day. I would go home and chug a liter of water because I was so thirsty. Not to mention the gowns we wore all day made us sweat.
When I was charge, we would have meetings 3 times a day to try to figure out how we were going to staff for the coming shift. We never had enough nurses so collectively as a group of charge nurses (5 of us), management and the house supervisor we would pool our resources together and figure out where we could run short that night. We knew it was unsafe and unfair to both the patients and the nurses, but we had no option. Our goal was quite literally just to keep the patients alive through the shift. We asked nurses to take on more than they ever had and more than we ever imagined we’d ask them to. I knew these nurses were coming into work exhausted from the night before only to be asked again to give more than they could give. But we all did it. We had to. What was the alternative? There was no way out of this.
In the next weeks, every time I went to work there was a new set of policies, new therapies and ideas introduced for the care of the COVID patient. It felt like starting over every day and if you took a few days off, when you came back into work you felt like you had no idea how to take care of a COVID patient correctly.
We didn’t have enough N95 masks so we were asked to use the same one for as long as we could. The CDC and manufacturer guidelines for these masks is to discard your mask after one interaction with a patient and not to use it for more than 4 hours or it would be ineffective. We were using the same masks for 3-5 shifts. Until they physically broke we were not allowed to get a new one. There was a “PPE allocation” checkpoint where we had to take our old mask and show that this was broken in order to get a new one and we had to attest with our employee number and signature every time we got a new one. Sometimes we would break the straps on purpose to be able to get a new mask. When we did need a new mask, we had to leave the unit to go to another part of the hospital to go to the PPE allocation checkpoint. Lack of time to be able to leave the unit often kept us from going to get a new mask even when we needed one
Everything in the ICU has a potential to be life threatening. There are alarms on everything to prevent a fatal event. The monitors, the beds, IV pumps, etc. ICU nurses are trained to respond immediately to these alarms, because they could mean the patient is in danger. If an IV pump beeps, it could mean a lifesaving medication needs to be refilled and if it’s not done quick enough the patient could have a bad outcome. If the patient’s vitals are unstable, the Monitor beeps and we run in quickly to assess what’s wrong and identify what the patient needs in order to be stable again.
With COVID, we couldn’t just run into the patient’s room without putting our PPE on. It would take us a few minutes to get in the room, hearing that alarm the whole time. This went against everything we’ve been taught. But we were given the new phrase “there’s no emergency in a pandemic” and we were to protect ourselves before going into a room. This just felt wrong and brought a lot of anxiety that we wouldn’t reach our patients in time.
At first, they were giving us scrubs to wear at work and we would change when we go to work and put our own clothes back on after our shift and leave the scrubs to be cleaned. This only lasted a few weeks until the laundering company couldn’t keep up with our increased demands. We were having to wear our own scrubs in the rooms and when we got home, we would strip down outside our houses and not touch anyone or anything in the house until we had showered. We deeply feared bringing COVID home to our family and getting them sick.
When I wasn’t at work, I’d get on social media and see all the arguing between the left and the right and see people’s opinions all over the place. Most of the people posting their options had no medical background and no science to back up what they were posting. This was infuriating to see, people being given wrong information and believing COVID wasn’t real or that the “numbers were inflated.” This was so defeating because it took all I had to get through a day and people who had never experienced the reality of COVID went on and on about how it wasn’t real. It was so real to me and to my patients and their families. I wish I had the luxury of believing it wasn’t real. How much easier would my life have been. Instead, it became my whole life. All i did and thought about. On my days off, I would just cry and think about what happened at work the days before. I could barely function. The only thing that got me out of the house was to workout. I didn’t have it in me to grocery shop, clean the house, take care of the dogs, cook. I didn’t know how-to carry-on conversation with its people who don’t work in healthcare. What was there to say? How could I go along with small talk when I was experiencing such hell at work? How did I even begin to share my pain and experience? Cam saw it every day I came home but no one else saw the extent of how broken down I was. I didn’t want to be seen as fragile or depressed. But that’s exactly what I was and still am.
As COVID becomes part of history and case numbers come down, I’m finally able to take a breath and process. What I went through was traumatizing and affected me deeply. How do I move forward? What do I learn from this and how do I heal instead of retreat?
