I Wish Wishing Worked

There’s something different about the fear that comes with the unknown. The silence. The anticipation. That first month in the hospital when we were waiting for Covid to hit was far more frightening than when we were actually in the middle of a surge. I’m a nurse at a decently sized hospital in a fairly large town and at the time I worked in the Neuroscience unit. Now, I work in the ICU.

I don’t know how to put the first month’s wait into words. It may be impossible. My hospital shut down to elective procedures when the surge was impending and my home unit at the time was almost all elective procedures. We were hearing about how deadly it was in other states and were watching it progress towards us. In the meantime we had almost no patients. All we could do was wait in the quiet for the absolute hell that we were told was supposed to come for us.

Then they slowly started trickling in. We went from four to nine to twenty-four in a matter of days. Suddenly, there was no silence and no anticipation. We were in the thick of it. With our half assed PPE and no knowledge of what we were getting into we jumped into the chaos feet first. It was busy all the time. We couldn’t stop… ever. Running from room to room we addressed vent problems and gave medications. People needed to be moved inter beds. Most of them needed to be proned on their stomachs so they could breathe better. Shifts became longer and longer and staff became more and more burnt out. The trauma and fear of what was happening to us began to sink in. My hospital tried to help us the best that they could but there wasn’t enough trained staff to go around.

I’ll never forget the terror of my patients who about to be intubated and didn’t know if they were going to wake up. Many of them didn’t. We tried everything we could to keep family connected but sometimes it just wasn’t enough. We tried but it wasn’t enough. Nothing was.

I remember being afraid to go anywhere in my scrubs after nurses started getting attacked by the public. One of my friends got punched and yelled at in a grocery store. Another got verbally assaulted while getting gas. The trauma was setting in. People couldn’t do it anymore. We lost a large chunk of our staff in that first wave. We lost even more in the years following.

I’d like to say it’s gotten better. Maybe we are just more used to it. Maybe we know how to deal with it better. The fear is still there. It feels like there is always going to be another wave incoming. We are always waiting for it and dreading it happening.

I can’t forget the faces of those I worked with. I can’t forget the pain of those I helped to treat. It’s nice to see those who have gotten better but still impossible to forget those who didn’t. I’ll never be able to forget their gasping breaths. I’ll never be able to forget the pain of their families. I wish this never happened and I wish the world didn’t have to suffer this. All I can do is hold out hope that the end is coming and that each wave will be shorter than the last.

Right now we are in a lull. If we have a patient with Covid it seems like it was an accidental finding. It’s not so bad right now. I still have hope.