I totally forgot that I started this blog. Oh my lanta. Anywho, I was driving and thinking about the events of this past year and wanted to write a Facebook post, except everyone is writing on Facebook. So I decided to write out my feelings here. And if you decide to read this article, I apologize in advance. I’m sure it will be totally biased, as most articles are; but I’m hoping to shed some light on what it’s like to deal with COVID on a daily basis. For the record, when I started hearing about the new Coronavirus, I thought it was just like the scares before in my life: SARS, Anthrax, Ebola, and Zika. I thought it was going to be an illness that didn’t really affect me and if I POSSIBLY happened to get it, I thought that I would be able to heal from it quickly. I don’t know if I ever actually had it since I never had a reason to get tested. So without further ado —
My experience has been quite unique from most people that I know; but probably not at all unique to healthcare workers across the United States and throughout the world. I was laid off in March 2020, collected unemployment for four months, started working on AP5 in August (COVID free — I also found out that AP5 is the designated COVID unit), and by October our floor was full with COVID patients. We spent four-and-a-half months caring for COVID patients (and still do — sometimes at full capacity, sometimes partial capacity). My first COVID 1:1 was a dying elderly lady who had decided that she did not want acceleration of care. She was made “comfort care” and passed away early in the morning while Chris Tomlin’s Good Good Father played on YouTube. It was the first COVID death I had witnessed and the first one in a long time since I had worked at a nursing home several years before. Since then, I’ve sat with many comfort care patients as they struggle to take their last breaths and I’ve found what a privilege it is to be in the presence of someone as they pass from this life to the next. It’s truly a precious moment that is bittersweet as I watched them suffer to breathe to no longer be in any pain.
There was a death that has traumatized me however. I’ll try not to be too terribly graphic; but that experience still haunts me months later. This patient also had COVID and I had to sit with him 1:1 because he kept jumping out of bed. Since we didn’t want him to fall, we sat with him because he didn’t seem to have impulse control and forgot to push the call button for help. His was a special case. You see, he had coded the morning before and was revived through CPR (at some point hospital staff discovered he was DNR and stopped compressions). He woke up, asked why they didn’t let him sleep, and then wanted breakfast. He got to call his family that day, ate three full meals, and sat up and watched TV until midnight because he needed to digest the food that he had eaten. As I helped him into bed, he said good-night to me and he slept the rest of the morning. Around 4am, the nurse sat in the room so I could go for lunch. When I got back she warned me to watch him because he likes to do funky things at that time in the morning. She said, “The first day he threw up blood and yesterday, he died. So just keep an eye on him.” Approximately, ten minutes later, a phlebotomist came in to draw some bloodwork. When she woke the patient up, he immediately began to panic and tried to get out of bed. We explained to him that if he would just let her draw the blood, I could help him get out of bed safely and he could sit in his chair. At that moment, he started convulsing and I was holding his shoulders as he was facing away from me. I asked the phlebotomist to hold him up so that I could hit the panic button on the wall. The charge nurse and several nurses on our floor, the PA, and critical response nurses came running in the room and helped me get him back into bed. When I saw his face, I realized what was going on, and because he was a No Code there wasn’t anything we could do except let him pass away. I asked if he had a seizure and if his heart stopped at the same time. The critical response nurse replied that sometimes convulsions happen when the heart stops suddenly like that.
I won’t tell every story that I experienced through COVID, but if I remember funny ones along the way, I’ll share them. Why do I share these experiences? Because I want people to know that COVID is real. I’ve watched so many people decompensate to scary levels: some recover, some don’t, and some that do will never be the same again physically. COVID affects all the body systems: respiratory, GI/GU, skin, and the nervous system. There are no words to describe the grief I have experienced over each patient that suffers. There are no words to describe the joy when they get to go home. There are no words to describe the dread that comes when the patient says they don’t want any more treatment. There are also no words to describe the fear that wells up when someone panics that their heart is going stop.
So what’s the point? Why do I share these stories and why do you care? Quite frankly, you may not care. But they are the reasons I still mask up even though I’m vaccinated. I fear that once regulations relax, we’ll have the biggest wave yet. I hope not and I hope that the vaccine works. I was nervous to get the vaccine myself, but I decided I was willing to risk side-effects and possible long-term effects of it because I didn’t want to suffer the long-term effects of COVID itself.
So what does this look like as the CDC starts relaxing requirements for vaccinated individuals? For me, personally, I don’t know. I’ll still have to mask at the hospital and that’s probably never going away. From what I’ve read, it looks like the CDC is starting to relax the requirements because we’re reaching enough numbers of fully vaccinated people that even if the spread of COVID continues, it shouldn’t be as severe as unvaccinated cases. Who knows?
Life Stories 