Tracking the next pandemic: Avian Flu Talk |
Dear Nurses: It's Ok to be Scared... |
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Newbie1A
Adviser Group Joined: January 26 2018 Location: Alberta Status: Offline Points: 11180 |
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Posted: March 24 2020 at 3:37pm |
A letter from an Ebola nurse (me) to the COVID-19 nurses (all of us):
It is OK to be scared.
Imma say that one more time.
It is totally, absolutely, completely, and wholly OK to be really, really, really, really scared.
It’s OK to be scared about going to work.
It’s OK to be scared about being on a ventilator.
It is completely normal to be scared about exposing your family to the virus.
Or worse.
It is OK to be at the end of your tether about how to manage being the one who has to work, carry the health insurance, and figure out how to fill the next six open, isolated weeks with your children at home. And support your partner now that they’ve lost their job.
To be overwhelmed by being so frightened at the thought of having to go back to work tonight — but knowing that by doing so, you are the final fragile thread that is keeping your whole family’s life tied together.
It’s OK to be so unbelievably fucking pissed at your hospital. At the for-profit healthcare system we’ve got in this country that allows administration to endorse minimal precautions in an effort to not have to find/purchase/steal/commandeer the PPE that will keep you safe.
If they’re not fighting for you now, will they ever? (#Unionize)
It’s OK to be enraged at a country so broken, so politicized, so skewed away from the tenets of basic humanity that we aren’t immediately implementing comprehensive testing, and taking even more radical steps towards mass isolation to ensure most of us make it through this alive.
Because some of us won’t.
And it’s OK to grieve.
*
A little more than five years ago, I stood in the “green” zone of my Ebola Treatment Unit in Sierra Leone. I watched over the fence as one of my nurses, one of my ‘national’ nurses, a nurse from Sierra Leone, fighting to save her own country, her own people, was escorted out of the back of an ambulance into the “red” zone, tired and pale and sick, had her blood drawn by her co-workers in full PPE, and was housed in the “Suspected” ward.
I stood there, and I wept. I cried and cried and cried. I couldn’t touch my face to cover my tears, so I just wept openly under a hot, hazy sky.
Gabriel, having left his family safely in northern Sierra Leone to come south to fight for his country as well, was one of our ‘sprayers.’ (They walked with us in the Unit and sprayed everything except the patients with diluted bleach, both before and after we touched it.) He walked up behind me, and stayed precisely three feet away from me.
“Don’t cry, Martha.”
I kept crying. “I am so FUCKING SICK of nurses and doctors dying. I am so FUCKING SICK of this thing killing us.”
“Don’t cry. It will be OK.”
I looked at him, red-faced and swollen and utterly broken. “How do you know? How will it be OK?”
Gabriel paused for a minute, looked at the sun behind the clouds, looked at the big trees covered in red dust outside the walls of the ETU, looked at the walls of the red zone, at the shack behind the “Confirmed” ward where we stacked the bodies of the dead, soaked in chlorine bleach and zipped into bodybags, and soaked in bleach again.
“I don’t know.” He said. But he smiled at me, just a small, comforting smile. “I don’t know how. But it will be OK.”
*
I signed up to be an Ebola nurse.
You didn’t sign up to be COVID-19 nurse.
So.
It’s OK to be scared.
Find your steps along this path in the way that feels right to you.
Be angry. Scared. Tired. Sad. Terrified.
But never forget that along with all those other feelings, you’re still – and always will be – a nurse. Even if you don’t feel it, it’s there. You are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. And as an Ebola nurse, I’m more proud of all of you than I can ever possibly say. New Blog Post 3/23/2020: There is no emergency in a pandemic. New Blog Post 3/21/2020: This is my only mask. |
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If it's to be - it's up to me!
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ViQueen24
Adviser Group Joined: May 14 2013 Location: Verona, PA Status: Offline Points: 12270 |
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OMG. My mother is a retired nurse. Thank God she's retired. I have told her not to leave our house. And, thank God, she doesn't have to. Thank God that is not her. But all these brave healthcare workers are somebody's sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters. How heartbreaking... |
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interwebber
V.I.P. Member Joined: March 21 2020 Location: Idaho Status: Offline Points: 355 |
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This post is amazing. God bless the nurses and doctors around the world putting their lives on the line to fight... past, present, and future. |
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If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem!
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CRS, DrPH
Expert Level Adviser Joined: January 20 2014 Location: Arizona Status: Offline Points: 26660 |
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God Bless your nurse heart!! Great post, thanks!! |
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CRS, DrPH
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