During the first (and second) COVID-19 surge, when hospital ICUs were overflowing all over the country, a lot of nurses and doctors took to social media to try and reason, plead, or terrify people into taking the coronavirus seriously. Now we are on round three as the Delta variant, which is far more contagious, takes over.
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Vaccinated people stand a good chance at having mild or no symptoms if they get the virus, but many unvaccinated people are still ending up in the hospital and the ICUs are filling up again.
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A woman claiming to be an ICU nurse named Kathryn Ivey, who posts on Twitter under @kathryniveyy, wrote a long thread about her somewhat unique perspective. She started working during July 2020, so for her, the full ICUs were normal.
“I became an ICU nurse at the end of July in 2020, during one of the first peaks of covid when it was all still so new,” she started. “I learned how to be a nurse behind a respirator and a yellow gown, amidst the constant beeping and hissing of ventilators that couldn’t support failing lungs.”
“Because I was so new, I had no baseline for what normal nursing looked like; I just had a vague sense that it couldn’t look like this,” she continued, explaining that it felt like they were just there to usher people into death. By the time most patients with COVID arrived, their bodies were in such bad condition it was hard to bring them back.
Ivey says she got used to it to a certain point, and began to try and do her best under the circumstances. But then some stuff started to change.
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Cases began to go down.
“We went from 3 covid ICUs to 2, then 1,” Ivey writes. “I started to see what it was like to be a nurse in pre-covid time and realized how many people normally survive. The things I did mattered, my actions actually saved lives – no longer was death my constant, silent companion.”
But it’s starting again, and it feels way, way harder for all the staff who know what’s coming.
“I don’t know what to say that will make people listen,” she says. “I wish I could snap so many people out of their selfish stupor but I can’t, so I get to watch instead as people learn the hard way; with a tube down your throat. With a ‘code blue, code blue!’ and the crack of a sternum.”
And she wishes that we had learned something the first round.
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Get vaccinated, people. We don’t have to keep living 2020 over and over again.
*First Published: August 2, 2021, 11:51 am
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