Surgical ICU Nurse - Damn Covid Virus

I want to share my perspective and let my nursing voice be heard.  I just spent five of the last seven days working because of the increased transmission of Covid and I am physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted.  This isn’t sustainable and it’s happening because some people are deciding that wearing a mask and physical distancing is just too much of an inconvenience for them.  If you are one of those people, please reconsider your choices; if you are wearing a mask, thank you so much and please continue doing so. 

My work day is 15-16 hours long and all but 2 of those hours involve actively caring for patients.  Not one of my patients last week planned on being in our ICU, but because of a fall at home, a car crash, a paragliding accident, feeling ill after an outpatient procedure, a fall while hunting, stomach pain that wouldn’t go away, drive-by shooting, being accidently run over by a trailer, excessive bleeding after childbirth; these people ended up needing an ICU bed and some way we found one for each of them.  This won’t be the case soon if we as human beings don’t start taking Covid seriously and wear the damn mask.

I don’t work in the Medical ICU where covid positive patients are cared for, but every patient that comes into the hospital is assumed to have Covid until testing negative.  This increases nurses and doctors workloads because we have to put on and carefully remove full PPE until each patient’s test results are negative.  In the Surgical ICU we hope test results come back negative, but that doesn’t always happen; my 25-year-old patient unexpectedly tested positive on Thursday, after having tested negative 5 days earlier.  Happily, there is no concern for me because I took the necessary precautions each time I went into that patient’s room, probably more than 30+ times during my shift.

My hope in writing this is to personalize what this virus means to healthcare workers for any of you who have stayed outside it’s reach.  You can make a difference for us.  Please, please, please choose to do so.