PBS NewsHour: "A Brooklyn ICU nurse on why she doesn’t feel like a superhero"Pre-COVID, generally it was like two patients to one nurse. The patients are so much sicker than the average ICU patient; and now, a nurse is dealing with five patients…As far as PPE…In other countries if you look at the health care infection rate, significantly lower than what the US is at right now…other countries are in a full-on “astronaut suit” where they don’t have any part of their skin exposed, but yet for the US weren’t just in a little thin paper gown; and sometimes we’re reusing that gown…How many more medical professionals need to get sick or even die for them to realize that? But it’s a serious problem."
And this:
On the other hand, I’m just doing my job, every day…an ICU nurse, you don’t go into the field expecting to not see death; it’s expected. But I think the amount that I’ve been seeing lately has been overwhelming, combined with just the public, ‘You’re a hero, you’re a superwoman.’ It just really sets an unrealistic expectation at how I can perform at work.
We need to look after these people, and not with some trivial and dismissive, “Give these heroes in scrubs the GI Bill.”; with real care for their emotional and physical trauma, and compensation for the risks they have had to take out of the lack of preparation and availability of protective equipment.
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ProPublica: “A Nurse Bought Protective Supplies for Her Colleagues Using GoFundMe. The Hospital Suspended Her.”
Medical providers will not forget how administrators treated them when the COVID-19 pandemic is over, said Dr. Zubin Damania, a Stanford-trained physician who is now a popular social media personality known as ZDoggMD. Damania has more than 1.6 million Facebook followers and is pushing for clinicians to reform American health care. He said he is getting more than 250 private messages a week from doctors, nurses and other health care providers, lamenting the lack of protective equipment and unclear communication and intimidation they’re getting from their administrators. In Mississippi, two doctors were reportedly fired for speaking out about coronavirus safety. A similar case was reported in Washington state.
Stranger
There are always heroes among us. That’s easy to remember in a time like this, let’s not forget it when we finally recover.
Washington Post: “Nurses, doctors take extreme precautions to avoid infecting family members“
- “What do you think is going to happen after covid-19, when people have died, your friends died, your nurses died? You are like, ‘Should I even go back to work?’ That’s how I feel when I take off my clothes,” Sun said. “All this, for the 45 minutes, that’s going on in my head.”*
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Thank a lot of them for their service by supporting an increase in the minimum wage.
Washington Post: “ ‘It was impossible. It’s still impossible.’: Mikaela Sakal, on being an ER nurse in an overwhelmed hospital and the decision she had to make”
*Like the night it was just Joey and me assigned to 26 critical patients. He’s one of our best nurses, and I’d like to think we make a good team. We were in the part of the emergency room called the TCU, or transitional care, where they put the sickest people before transferring them to the ICU. Usually, you might have 10 patients in there, with a few on ventilators who will transfer within a few hours. This night we had eight on vents and the rest on supplemental oxygen. Some of the patients were awake and some were sedated. A few patients had been in there for 90 hours. The ICU was full and we didn’t have anywhere else to put people. There were stretchers lined against the walls. We ran out of oxygen monitors. We had extension cords running everywhere.
You need to be everywhere at once. That’s how it feels. You don’t go to the bathroom. You don’t eat. You’re lucky if you find time in a 12-hour shift to get water. You spend every minute moving from patient to patient, trying to keep them stable and alive.
There’s constant noise, and it’s all so mechanical. There’s really no talking. We’re not allowing any visitors, and the patients are sedated or just trying to breathe. Most of them are too sick to ask for what they need. But call lights are going off and the tweeter is beeping every time we get another medical trauma, which happens like 15 or 20 times a night. The phones ring all the time, and it might be a family member asking for an update, but you look at the number and if it isn’t a doctor, you honestly don’t have time. Alarms are going off every minute. Pump alarms for the patients’ life-sustaining medications. Monitor alarms. Oxygen alarms. Heart-rate alarms. Some beep, some chime, some ring. Every one could mean a crisis. I’d go home and hear alarms. All of us do. Sometimes, I think I’m hearing them in my sleep.*
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Washington Post: “When covid-19 claimed two of their own, these EMTs grieved and kept on going”
- The EMTs say they are grateful for the support, but don’t feel like heroes when so many are dying.
Everyone has that one coronavirus call that they think about over and over again. For Castaneda, it was the man who had collapsed on the floor, dying, with his three children, wife and mother saying prayers in Spanish and begging her to “please bring him back to life.”
“When you are treating the patient, the adrenaline is rushing, but when you get off shift, that’s when it hits,” she said. “The kids crying and screaming and screaming.”*
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