It's been a year since Covid-19 pandemic hit the world. Essential workers including healthcare staff took on a huge task of risking lives in order to provide service to the affected.
I am Gelli, a registered ICU nurse in the face of pandemic. I'd always remember the horror that is COVID-19, but I would also treasure the faces, lives, and brave souls I worked with, took care of, and shared struggles with in the most stressful year to this date. 2020 surely was the rock bottom for most of us.
I don't know where to start to be honest. I just know that there's a void in my heart caused by this pandemic. Too much loss, perhaps. But I want to highlight the ones that struck me to my core, and hopefully, in sharing this, other people would understand why we're different people after this.
*Trigger warning* You may read some disturbing events.
1. Code blues
There were shifts when the reaper's hotline is endless. Code blue after code blue after code blue. As an ICU nurse, I'm in charge of rapid responses and code blues. It's when patients deteriorate, lose a pulse, become unresponsive, or yes, die. Responding to code blues is already a reflex to me. You hear a code, you run, and do whatever your assigned task is. I may be the recorder, compressor, in charge of medication, in charge of pads and monitor and so forth. It depends which role you land on in that given day. It's team work. A successful code happens when the team performs like a well-oiled machine, no matter the outcome. Every code presents differently. It can be bloody, relentless, unforgiving, and painful to watch. Pre-covid, we would have 2 or 3 for the whole day. With COVID, there were multiple times it was 20 times more for the whole day. I feel fatigued just thinking about it. Some days we survive, some days we are dead inside.
2. Body bags
In my 8 years of nursing career, I never bagged a single body. Yes we do post mortem care, but funeral homes usually pick up the body right away. Or we wheel the body down to the morgue. All that changed with COVID. Due to the number of dead bodies, funeral homes and morgues were in full capacity. Refrigerated trucks were rented out by hospitals. We were bagging the bodies in piles. We were storing bodies in makeshift morgues, in patient rooms, even in unused restrooms. It was a nightmare. It felt as if I was enclosing my soul in those body bags as well. Just moments earlier, those patients were alive and now they're not. I was walking the line between hell and reality. It felt like hell but it was real, and I don't know which one scares me more.
3. No family member in sight
In ICU setting, if there is no family member, you're basically just talking to a sedated patient. With Covid's transmission rate, family members were denied access to the hospital. Sometimes, video/phone calls with families are sufficient, but most of the time, it's really not the most suited option especially when the patient is dying. You hear cries, prayers, last words thru the phone and you become the warm touch that patients felt in their last moments, and you just hope it's enough to fill the gap. Unfortunately, we know the answer to that. When you're intubated, sedated, and helpless, you just fight the Covid war alone, with the medical staff by your side. It's not the easiest thing. We always say it's a miracle others survived and fully recovered.
4. Before intubation
Those critical patients require ventilators as their last resort. When the oxygen in the blood is critically low, patient is restless. And when we already tried other plan of care with no improved result, that tube as airway is the only hope we rely on. Some patients would still be awake before the intubation. The frightening thing about that is--- you won't know if you'll wake up from it. Most died. Some woke up. Others are alive but with lifelong deficits. It just depends on the person's lifestyle, tolerance, medical history, lung function and whatnot. Nobody really knows for sure if a patient will survive. We can only hope.
"How can I fight if I'll be asleep the whole time?" To which I answer, "You just have to trust and have faith that you're gonna wake up and see your family again." Because you give hope no matter how hopeless.
5. The sudden silence
That moment after a code when you lose a patient. Or after you tell their loved ones the patient just died. The sigh after a post mortem care. The quiet you make before you leave your car. Or before you enter your home after a long shift. When you close your eyes after praying for this pandemic to end. The look among your coworkers when tired isn't all that your body feels. The staring at the monitor. The feel of your cracked hands. The lingering question, "Will this be over?"
A year after it all began.
A month after my last COVID assignment, I still feel defeated.
Memories still flash before my eyes. And no matter how good I am at separating my feelings from my profession, there will always be that pinch of reality that would haunt me even to the best days of my life. Now it is up to me to anchor this reality to my purpose.
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.- Patti Smith
There is no greater suffering than those who lost their loved ones to this battle. However there is also suffering in survival
and it is suffering, nevertheless.
Comments