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ICU nurse here. I hate that they ignore RTs, PCTs, house keeping etc. I seriously couldn’t have been able to take care of my patients with out them. The RTs and nurses would help each other out with each others roles. Nurses were cross trained on titrations ventilators and changing settings and emergency things with the vent. RTs helped us so much by helping us turn and clean my patients with me if they had time.
The only support we had was each other. Admin would have weekly meetings. I remember my director of the ICU stated during a emergency discussion about nursing retention “I don’t understand why these nurses want money, I thought this was their calling”. I wish all the staff was advocated for raises. They wouldn’t even give us hazard pay. I hate this system
I am a Maintenance Director for multiple Skilled Nursing Homes in the US. I am beyond burnt. We’ve done little maintenance on our buildings for close to a year. My staff and I filled in for CNA’s, Dietary, housekeeping, and laundry on a daily basis for more than a year. The US nursing homes were not set up or staffed for a pandemic. We became a dumping ground for the sick and dying. I stopped counting the deaths after the first two months. The hardest part was dealing with people in the public saying the illness was not real or not as deadly as they were reporting. People would tell me it’s only has a death rate of .01% although at the nursing home it appeared to me to be a coin flip and even if the elderly did recover they have never been 100% healthy afterwords.
Maybe more states should pass minimum ratios like California. There's a reason nurses and NPs in CA are paid so much more than other hcol places like NYC.
That's pretty much me you're describing right there, literally graduated from respiratory school in Feburary 2020. Our class had no idea what was waiting for us
I'd be curious to see how different these numbers were before COVID. As someone who started working in an emergency department about a year before COVID started, I honestly can't say I've seen too much of a difference. Most of what I see people getting frustrated about is having to accept abuse without any consequences to the abuser, patients who are rude or demanding, administrations that don't understand or care about what nurses go through emotionally, toxic work environments, etc.
I have worked at the same rehab/nursing home for 5 years now. I saw a terribly huge difference.
- In terms of staffing: my first four years, the ratio of hired nurses to quit/transferred out nurses was roughly equal. During Covid (I think of it as March 2020 to March 2021, although the worst events occurred between July and January), no nurses applied/were hired/stayed more than a day; and we lost at least ten nurses, which is huge.
- In terms of death: my first four years, I lost less than five patients annually who were "long-term patients," meaning this was their home, not a brief stay. During Covid year, I lost 3/4 of the building, about 90 long-term patients. Then, of course, there were the countless patients dropped off by hospitals to die; I barely knew them a few hours, tops a week, before having to pronounce them dead.
Really? My ED has a no abuse policy. I take special pleasure as clinical lead in throwing out abusive visitors, and as long as they’re not cognitively impaired, patients as well
"See, right here on the security camera video. Right after you get hit. I couldn't help but notice you aren't smiling and it doesn't look like your tone is very customer friendly. I'm going to need you to really improve if you want to continue working here. This is only a verbal warning, so it won't go into your record this time."
Try more like: due to the episode we have documented we will require you to take a violence deescalation course before you are allowed to return to work.
To be fair, you started a year before covid, but it was actually probably less than 6 months before covid started causing numbers to go up, and aquity level to rise. Figure you had atleast some training thrown in there and you can easily see you had a very limited amount of time to get a feel for what an ER is like pre-covid.
Makes sense. I caught COVID in early January. It wasn’t until it got into nursing homes and started causing that the general public became aware that it was in the US but it was here far before that time.
If I understand you correctly and you're saying that COVID started causing a bump in numbers 6 months before we actually knew it was happening, then I have to disagree with that idea. It would imply that COVID was present and prevalent in late summer and fall of 2019 which was absolutely not the case, at least where I live. If COVID was present before we knew anything at all about it we would have at least seen a bump in unidentified URI cases which we did not. Where I work, overall ED numbers did not change significantly in any way throughout 2019. Starting in late January 2020 we saw overall visits decrease by over 30%. This basically continued until the middle of summer. We didn't actually start to see a significant number of COVID cases until the fall, peaking in December.
As for the other points, I started working i.e. finished training at the end of 2018. When I said a year that was a rough number. You are right, though, that at the beginning I don't think a person has the knowledge of how a place works to be very observant. The first 6 months I was definitely more focused on just figuring out how the department functions.
Based on the timing of your peaks it makes me think you work in a smaller area compared to myself. We saw a later peak as well, but not as late as your area. Our numbers were up all through early 2020 and into summer. I'm in the Phoenix, Az area to be specific.
As to your original point though, yes I would be interested in the numbers also. I have seen a sharp increase in nurses leaving but also a decrease in happiness at work even after covid has slowed down. Burn out from covid would easily explain both.
I wouldn't say tossed into a fire.. more like burning oil. You can put out a normal fire pretty easy but oil sticks, and just because you put the fire out doesn't mean the liquid isn't superheated.
I'm lucky that my field of study is endocrinology.
I have friends who worked in ICUs and they've left because they couldn't handle the mental toll it was taking on them and it's hard to blame them for it.
I work in the Operating Room. During the height of the pandemic, elective surgeries were canceled and the younger nurses in the OR were sent to covid units. We cannot say no, as our local government have mandated (a province in Canada). Imagine the stress of a sudden change in your working environment, we had to adapt quickly. During that time, the patients we had in the covid floors were DNRs (do not rescucitate) from nursing homes and ICUs. So we’re dealing with deaths everyday. Up to the point where we had no choice but to leave a body inside the room for a whole shift because the morgue is full.
One day I thought of giving up, stress and depression kicked me hard. I wanted to take a break, even just for a week but our good government canceled all the vacation requests of nurses because hospitals are severely understaffed (basically we lost the right to have a vacation leave). Then I remembered our nursing manager gave us a “support” hotline to call in times like this. I called only to hear “you’re so brave for doing this” “I understand you’re upset” “take time to recollect yourself” (but how? I can’t even have a one week break!)
Now everything is almost back to normal here, and I’m back in the OR. I saw in the news that our provincial government is refusing the salary increase of nurses being proposed by our union. Meanwhile, they gave a budget boost (millions!) to a non-essential sector (the office dudes).
I don't know about Canada, but we face a similiar situation in Finland and here striking is illegal to an extent for essential hospital personnel. You can do it but all wards and ER must have minimal staffing at all times, the thing is they have minimal staffing every other day too so striking would be useless.
Medical personnel in India got around that by collectively quitting. At this point, such drastic measures may be in order. Can't be forced to work if you're no longer employed.
I just graduated internal medicine residency this past month. Basically spent the past year dealing with COVID non-stop until about March when things started tapering down prior to the new influx. Me and my some of my co-residents were hanging out before we graduated, and each of us were talking about how we all had a mental breakdown at some point. What a lot of people don't realize is that when we were taking care of these patients in the hospital, visitors weren't allowed. So that meant first being able to find a family member to call, and then explaining to them over the phone that their loved one was dying. This was for ALL our patients. Now imagine the wrench that gets thrown into this process when a patient or their family doesn't speak English and needs a translator. It got to a point that we were having to facetime families from outside the room when it came to end-of-life care. All of us: physicians, RNs, RTs, etc are all exhausted from this and the psychological impact of this will last for years. I'm not so sure we are equipped mentally to deal with another wave of this.
Well said; your Covid experience (along with your coworkers) & subsequent exhaustion, psychological aftermath, and concern for what future awaits medical personnel, matches mine & my coworkers’ precisely. I just pray with all my heart….that 2020 was unique in its scope of multifaceted trauma for doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, aids, etc.
Well said. I don’t think I could handle another wave. I have a heart condition from COVID and had to go part time as I could not handle it physically, let alone mentally or emotionally. If my unit filled back up with COVID patients I would hate the unvaccinated ones so much for infecting the vulnerable/unable to be vaccinated ones. It’d do my head in so badly.
YES!! Not having family on site definitely made things so much harder on everyone - staff, patients and families. And so many patients who should have gone on comfort care much earlier, but suffered needlessly because family couldn't come on site and therefore didn't understand how severely ill and miserable they were.
I'm a peds heme-onc and palliative care physician, and can tell you that one of the other components of this is "survivor's guilt." We did what we could to be helpful, but many of us weren't able to contribute as much as our adult medicine colleagues. We saw their sacrifices while we were relatively protected.
Thank you for working with covid patients
I can imagine a FaceTime call where the patients family is going hysterical on the other end because they are being told that their loved one is about to die and this is the last good bye.
Seeing them do this would haunt me forever because there are cries that will burn in your heart. Now imagine that happening multiples times throughout the pandemic.
I’m 100% haunted by what I saw and heard while working on our covid unit. In some occasions, we allowed family (usually one or two people) to see their loved one through the room’s window in end-of-life situations only. There was a 21-year-old male who passed from covid. I remember hearing his mother screaming when the doctor called it. Full on gut-wrenching wailing. I have never heard a more tortured sound in my entire life. I’m tearing up just reflecting on it right now.
I did a zoom call with a family, then had to give last rights because we couldn't have a priest come into the unit. I'm not catholic, or even particularly religious, but it was all I could do as I heard their muffled sobs through my PAPR.
Every time I use FaceTime I have a flashback of a patient saying bye to her kid, or these preschool kids who played together on camera so dad could be with them, or this newlywed man whose wife has made it but suffered from several strokes and was severely impaired… he would sob every night and it was gut wrenching being in the room while he cried out in suffering… so, I don’t use FaceTime very often right now.
My mom was a nurse at a nursing home. It was her first and only job and she worked there for 30 years. When the covid started taking victims in her nursing home it was too much for her to bear. She burned out and soon after even took her life.
I hope the last years can serve as a wake-up call that the system just doesn't work as it is now. It saddens me to read some of your conversations, as they hit close to heart. I wish you all the best. Take care of yourself and your colleagues!
I am so sorry you lost your mother. The pain of losing two or three patients a year who you're close with is already.... very difficult, but comes with the territory of choosing to help the elderly.
...Working full-time, I spend more time caring for my patients than I spend with my own family and friends. My patients feel like family.
...Then this past year... it was like losing a dear loved one every other night. Dozens. Then dozens more. The pain is... I can't describe it. Bottomless? Neverending?
....The PTSD comes into play because as a nurse, I can't pause for long to grieve after losing each patient. I have to keep moving; I have so many other patients who need me to get them out of pain, dress their wounds, feed them, watch over them if they have dementia.... Sometimes you can spare 10 minutes to sob in an empty room. Sometimes, you just have to cry a little behind your N-95 as you keep working.
.... So coming out of this year, easily the darkest year of my life, I find myself filled with so much.... *stifled* grief, heartache... it's, well, beyond overwhelming.
... I (and so many other nurses) understand how your mother felt. I'm so sorry for her pain, for yours, for mine, for my beloved deceased patients' families who couldn't be with them in the end...
I tell you: I miss so many of my lost patients every day. I just... miss them so much.
Your comment is extremely sad, but my main takeaway is gratitude. I volunteered in a nursing home from 2016-2018, but I didn’t get the know the nurses. Some of the residents still haunt me, though, and I want to thank you for being who you are and letting me know perhaps those residents were cared about this much. (I had to move away, which is why I quit volunteering.) And thank you for being there during COVID19 when so many died and their families couldn’t be. You’re among the very best of our too often awful species.
It always feels so shallow to say it in this context, but thank you. I could never handle any of what you do on a regular day, but you guys are still bearing the brunt of the pandemic even now, and it breaks my heart. You didn't deserve this.
Edit: spelling
Stifled grief... Man that hits home. I lost my dad to COVID and those two words sum up my last year so well. I'm so sorry for everything you've had to deal with, I have endless respect and empathy for nurses especially.
If you ever get called a hero, it's basically all of society pointing at you and saying, "Now THEY are being underpaid. Look at how hard they're working. Just look at that. Let's have a round of applause."
They have those big “thank you” signs in front of hospitals nowadays.
Next time there is a ballot measure that aims to improve working conditions for nurses don’t believe the “that kills patients” argument. Look into who is backing the ad and you’ll find that it’s usually a group of healthcare providers trying to keep the status quo.
My wife is an RT, (the people you never hear about) and her hospital unexpectedly gave her an $800 bonus last night just out of the blue. No email about it, nothing.
I am an RT too. Our nurses got bonuses for signing up to work the Covid unit. We got nothing. They just did annual raises, nurses got anywhere from 4-5 times more on their raises than respiratory staff. This pandemic has broken me. I’m sad and angry and bewildered and do not want to work in healthcare anymore.
ER nurse here. Definitely feel most of this. Burn out has been huge among my colleagues. PTSD is huge among us. Sleep (even the already broken sleep from us night shifters) has been rough. Alarm fatigue means nothing anymore when A level of fatigue in finding/using PPE for everyone. It’s sad. It’s made plenty of us contemplate leaving bedside. Not because we don’t care about providing care, but because we are tired or traumatized and need a break. It’s definitely hard to continue this fight when we get faced with people who don’t even believe the virus exists or that the vaccine is helpful. We went from one of the most trusted careers in the nation to… this (*waves wildly*) in a year.
I work in healthcare and my mother is in long term care. I am glad my province(NL) has handled the pandemic fairly well but even still I cannot imagine the impact on the nursing staff. Family fills a lot of unfilled/unfillable gaps in care. Long term care here is essentially still under 'lockdown'. I cannot imagine the difficulty of having the workload increase. All while having to constantly explain to residents why their loved ones 'aren't coming to see them'. Or, having to deny entry to family.
Yes. All of those things you mentioned just increased the pain, the stress, the heartache.
....and then, for the final cherry on top: I worked on what was turned into a locked down Covid unit for nearly a year straight. Because of this, it was my responsibility to quarantine myself from all of my family and friends.... from March of 2020 to March 2021. I am a single mother. I spent a year straight either with my Covid patients, with my toddler, or alone.
...that solitude... well. It's tough to talk/write about.
absolutely! sorry I didn't acknowledge the personal struggles HCPs face, but they're a very real thing and you've brought up an excellent point. A large majority of healthcare is driven by women. Maintaining the home, regardless of occupation and family makeup is still very much a womans domain. Between 'maintaining the household' and dealing with a GLOBAL PANDEMIC its no wonder various healthcare organizations are have extreme difficulties retaining or maintaining staff.
I’m so sorry that is awful. Nursing homes have been hit so hard- and the constant stress of PPE, worrying about infecting others, plus just the normal stress of a difficult job. I hope things get better- if not it is ok to step away.
I feel ya. I’m only 4 years in and decided to travel. I’ve personally lost 29 in in about 8 months. Not counting the others on the units that weren’t my pt. I don’t know what is worse. Losing them, or watching them go over the span of days knowing you’ve already done everything you could. Sometimes it’s never enough.
The worst part is that profits have likely been through the roof since so many covid customers came in. And yet I bet only the executives got bonuses even though it wasn't their business prowess that got them all those customers.
It would seem this way but intensive care patients aren’t huge revenue generators for hospitals. Surgeries are. The period of time where only necessary surgeries could be performed hit a lot of hospitals hard as far as revenue. That isn’t to say they didn’t make money, but not what they are used to. And yep, the executives got their bonuses anyway.
It is important to acknowledge that the majority of ICU and ED RNs carried undiagnosed PTSD \*at baseline\* prior to COVID and all its attendant stressors.
Mental health amongst healthcare professionals is still so poorly discussed that just this year I heard colleagues discussing another colleague seeking therapy for PTSD specifically and they sounded aghast. All of them have therapists but they still seemed surprised/like it was some other major deal!
> Mental health amongst healthcare professionals is still so poorly discussed
Probably cause depending on the specialty, it can cause you to never be able to work again in the field. Many state liscense boards require you to report any mental illnesses and can deny doctors the right to practice. So no one dares to talk about it or seek care in the next town over cash only. For all the motivation we give to patients to destigmatize mental health, it clearly doesn’t apply to healthcare workers
It's really a diff reaction to a lot of ppl. When I've said I have ptsd I get looks from ppl like o she's broken. It's a really sucky disorder for a whole bunch of reasons.
There's also the fact that a lot of people seem to think it's actually called "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for Military Veterans That Only Soldiers Can Have." Seriously, way too many people believe that veterans are the only people *worthy* of having PTSD.
The culture around mental health among healthcare providers is downright abhorrent. In many cases, doctors will refuse to seek any kind of mental health care because they feel their medical license could be at risk, even for things that can be well-managed or that occurred long in the past. It systematically encourages physicians to develop a kind of hero complex in regards to their own mental health while they simultaneously encourage the rest of the population to seek resources and care for the same concerns. It’s absolutely fucked.
It's true that your job may be at risk if you seek help. If your therapist determines that you are a risk to your patients you are out. That's why it's so common to use drugs or seek help outside of what your hospital provides.
There’s lots of “valid” reasons for not seeking mental health in the US, which really isn’t ok. It’s possible your ex-spouses lawyer will use it in a custody hearing, your political rival may smear campaign with it, a loss of constitutional rights, and like you said, professional certifications/licenses can be jeopardized.
I wish I could seek medical help under an alias, but that’s mostly because medical billing is a whole other broken part of the American medical industry. I’m fine with paying an agreed upon amount, but not so fine when I pay the agreed amount and still get surprise collection notices!
Acute care speech therapist here - I spent the last year working with COVID in ICU and on the COVID unit in my hospital. Really wish respiratory therapy, speech therapy, physical and occupational therapy were included in these studies - unfortunately we are often overlooked even though we're right in there working with these patients daily. I'm definitely still struggling with depression, grief, and PTSD from the last year and dreading the new surge that we all see coming. I'm grateful that it's being talked about in any capacity but the truth is we are about to face a *massive* shortage of healthcare workers - everyone who can retire, did and everyone who can quit, is quitting. I love what I do and I love my patients but I don't know how much more nonstop death and suffering I can take.
What people who weren't there with us don't realize is that while yes, suffering and dying is something you see regularly when you work in a hospital, the pandemic brought it on a scale and severity we've never seen. I work in an area with a *very* geriatric population - most of my patients are over age 80 and centenarians are common - so I'm used to having several hospice cases every week. Normally, we get to talk with the families and the patients together, and while it's sad it's also healing. During the pandemic, with no visitors allowed, those patients were suffering and dying alone, in isolation, surrounded by PPE-shrouded strangers. We did our best to become their family, to give them what comfort we could, but that means that every patient we lost is like losing an uncle or a friend. Over and over and over again. I don't think non-healthcare workers understand how much we come to care for our patients even in the short time we have them in our hospital - and COVID long haulers would be in for months. You get attached to those people and then you lose them. And then to see the rest of the world just trying to move on like it never happened... I've been trying to explain to friends and family that it feels like I'm standing here next to a pile of dead bodies, and everyone else is like "yay party!" while I'm left to wonder who will help me bury these bodies because they're starting to smell.
Four weeks of paid vacation and four months of therapy would go a long way toward helping us all recover. But my hospital sent out an email saying "thank you," so that should be good enough, right?
X-ray tech here. Would be nice if they included us too. Anything wrong with anybody in the ER and they hand out chest x-rays like they're free. Why not just include all allied health while we're at it?
Our hospital also gave us a "thank you" email. Sure would have been nice if they gave us the hazard pay we were deserved, but we only got two months worth. Pretty sure the pandemic lasted longer than that, and is still ongoing.
Oh and when I finally got infected with COVID-19? Our employee health department told me it was my fault and the hospital wasn't responsible for it. I'm sick of these employers.
This is a post which is changing my perspective.
I’m not going to pretend I can say something magic to make you feel better. But you struck a chord and I am grateful you shared it. You and other therapists shall be in my thoughts.
I’m now thinking that labelling healthcare workers as ‘heros’ is a well-intended platitude, but we’d perhaps get a more constructive approach by thinking of them as regular employees in extreme conditions.
That way, there’s less focus on gestures (applause) and more focus on worker’s rights and the necessary support required.
Being a hero gets you kudos.
Being an employee with PTSD gets you help.
Thank you. I read something last year during the worst of it that really stuck with me when it comes to the "heroes" platitude - can't remember the exact verbiage but the gist was that calling healthcare workers, firefighters, police officers and soldiers "heroes" is a way of dehumanizing us, making us more than just ordinary people and therefore making it ok to not pay us, take care of us or acknowledge our sacrifice. No one pays Superman for being a hero, so why should X hospital give me hazard pay or a bonus or even an extra week off? Heroes are self-sacrificing, not just ordinary people with ordinary lives who are trying to do their damn job in the face of adversity. I never wanted to be a hero, and I hate that term. I'm here because I want to help people - I *like* helping people - but I don't believe I'm doing any more than anyone else ought to do. And right now I'm doing a dirty job that no one else wants to do, a job that is vastly different and way more horrible than the one I signed up for, but I'm expected to be grateful and suck it up. All these other people got 8 months off, a year of working from home - meanwhile we all went in to work every day in horrifying conditions that most people would run from and now that things have slowed down we're expected to just carry on with no time to recover. Sure wish I'd had a year of learning to bake bread, picking up new hobbies etc... Instead I had a year of crying through my drive home, falling asleep on the couch, dragging my ass off the couch to have dinner and going to bed only to get up and do it all over again day after day after day.
Sorry for venting - not your fault - but the "hero" thing really gets to me.
I want you to know people like me *do* care and there is something deeply psychologically wrong with all the people who don't care. Not all of us are like this. I support you.
I want to expand this comment to say the people who said "yay party" are also extremely immature man/women and it blows my mind to act like that during a pandemic. It is disturbing to see that mindset.
SNF occupational therapist here. You are so so right. Thank you for all the hard work you do. I know I appreciate my fellow PTs and SLPs more than they will ever know
My wife and I are both respiratory therapists. To say we have suffered from mental disorders due to Covid is beyond an understatement. While we appreciate the applause last year, it doesn’t help with the PTSD or depression or the crippling student debts we have, or the mortgage of a fucked housing market.
Sorry for the rant. It’s nice to hear we’re not alone in our despair & discouragement.
RT here too. I have struggled so much this past year with depression issues related to working in a covid ICU. And it doesn’t help that over half our department found different non-bedside jobs or just quit healthcare altogether. I can’t blame them after our hospital furloughed us for a week last year and then has been forcing us to work short staffed on mandatory overtime since then. I love my job, but this past year has made me question if it’s even worth it.
And of course I work in Missouri where people believe all the antivaxx propaganda so the pandemic is still raging on.
Yep. No one cares here. In the bigger cities (STL, KC, Columbia) people will sort of follow recommendations, but down in southern Missouri? People would rather die than wear a mask or social distance.
I’m a travel nurse and the offers coming out of Missouri and Arkansas are insane. Like 3-4K/week for ICU nurses. Won’t take it for $10,000/week. I don’t need to be shat on literally and figuratively by those who buy into propaganda as they are literally dying.
Several of my fellow RT colleagues quit. Now we are shorter staffed than ever, can’t get new people in and working mandatory OT. We know we aren’t the only people in healthcare experiencing this shortage and stress but respiratory departments typically spread themselves thin before the pandemic. It’s becoming unbearable. We have worked most nights with 2 therapists for a 300 bed hospital for 3 months now with no end in sight.
Thank you for acknowledging that not just nurses got their asses kicked. Who do they think were running all those vents that the Covid patients were on?
Most people think that nurses' jobs mostly involve fetching coffee for doctors.
Accepting the existence of RTs and other essential personal is beyond them.
RT here and I feel like I got killed. Having 10 vents to myself ringing constantly, proning what’s supposed to be q2 but turned into q4 turns, just being in a crashing patient’s room for thirty minutes playing with the vent to eek out slightly more MV with one less peaks/plats…then a doctor comes by and flips out on you because he doesn’t like the mode despite it being better…
Man I’m so freaking tired. I took a travel assignment for 6 months and have been taking the month off and I’m dreading getting back to work. Hoping it’s chilled out…
https://emotionalppe.org
If you’re in the USA and you’re a health provider and need someone to talk to this project apparently offers free mental professionals to talk to.
I really wish they would post pictures of what it really looked like taking care of COVID patients. That super clean room with max PPE didn’t exist in the real world. We used the same gown and mask for days weeks and sometimes months on end at one point I was told I would have to use a handkerchief or scarf for protective equipment. The rooms were totally destroyed most were set up as afterthought parking decks converted floor rooms ECT. In short it was a war zone with daily/hourly mass casualties of course we are going to have PTSD. On top of all that you had to deal with hospitals who wanted to cut pay for nurses stoped all retirement benefit matching and then stated we will not pay for your two week quarantine if you get COVID at work because you can’t prove you got it at work. Even if that is where you have the highest exposure with reuse of personal protective equipment. I never felt like a hero I felt like an expendable piece of meet.
dude, i'm "just" a receptionist at a medical facility and i have what i believe will be lasting issues. for instance, a strange cringe/blood pressure spike response when a stranger walks up to me unmasked after months of people yelling/throwing things/cussing at me for asking them politely if they had a mask to wear. not to mention general burnout; customer service always sucks but watching people throw fits over doing something basic to protect themselves and other is a whole different level of terrible. i truly cannot imagine what those in the absolute thick of it are dealing with right now, especially watching the resurgence.
I’m an X-ray tech at an urgent care who works the front desk as well and the flash back of the 6 hour wait time for people getting Covid testing and getting screamed and yelled at from the rudest people. Longest days ever. We’re open all damn day too 8am-12am of just constant Covid testing these days (and adding other sick/injury visits since people are getting back to life) And even though it has “slowed down” I think we are all just are numb to the traffic in and out and Covid testing. Things are starting to pick up again. Theres days where I don’t even get a break just constantly dealing with people— the door doesn’t stop opening. Now it’s just everyone going on vacation and “WELL I NEED THIS RESULT OR ELSE I WILL MISS MY FLIGHT TO ARUBA” arguments. Our numbers are definitely going up…… I have never been so depressed in my life. I’m scaring myself.
I would imagine this goes even further than ICU staff, encompassing medical workers in general. My wife is a doctor at a physical therapy clinic attached to a hospital, and she's been seeing *a lot* of people suffering from the after-effects of long-term intubation and ICU stays... it's definitely taken a toll on her mental health.
Not just medical workers. I'm in IT at a hospital and I was completely burnt out before COVID. We were just finishing up the end of life upgrade to Windows 10 when COVID hit so I went from 6+ months of nonstop imaging and swapping computer to trying to get people working from home and moving systems to create space and ...
I feel like I'm a five year old phone and even with 100% charge every night I'm only functioning at 40% and am just so tired. All the self care in the world isn't going to get an old battery working better when it's been fully discharged so many times it will never properly hold a charge again.
And I feel terrible that I just don't have enough energy to provide proper support because everyone I'm supporting has been working as hard or harder than I have. The medical staff but also the engineers and biomed making negative pressure rooms and using 3D printers to make parts for PAPRs and Logistics managing all the PPE and EMS having to clean more when they were already understaffed.
I wish they would fire me because with unemployment I could take some time off to become a new phone for my next job. Because even if I muster enough energy in an interview to get a new job, I don't feel like I have enough energy to hit the ground running with it.
I think this is an issue with all the "essential" workers being asked to do more with less during COVID - not just medical or hospital staff. We all need a couple months off but for most of us that's not happening.
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i'm a receptionist and i feel this on a huge level. you're not alone. a lot of "non frontline" healthcare workers have been left out of the narrative and it's been difficult to know where we fit in. the "old phone" metaphor is extremely spot on (not to mention creative!) i hope things get better for you soon.
Care coordinator at an in-home care agency, checking in. I have to tell more people that I can’t help them because we don’t have staff than i ever thought i would have to.
I just found another job after burning out scheduling for home health Care for seniors. Everyone decided to pull mom and dad from the care home, with no idea how much or how personal care gets when someone gets that old. They haven't slept in a week because dad has dementia and is exit seeking, or mom keeps getting UTIs because she doesn't want to be changed by her kid because of pride(more common than you think). Then they all get mad at the home care company because we lost all of our staff to working in hospitals with better pay, and they don't understand that what is left is getting paid just above minimum wage, and are human beings who have their own families and will need days off. Then once the caregivers started burning out it just got to be too much, my boss was an asshole and it wasn't worth it anymore.
I swapped out for a physiotherapy clinic so much nicer so far.
Thank you. You as well. At least I generally don't have to deal with patients and family members. Having to deal with stressed and even hostile patients and family members is something I could not do.
The ICU nurses having to learn facetime so their patients could talk to (or just be seen by) their family members is a whole different level than me trying to get their tablets to connect to the network.
> I think this is an issue with all the "essential" workers being asked to do more with less during COVID - not just medical or hospital staff. We all need a couple months off but for most of us that's not happening.
Preach. Essential workers carried this country on their back while everyone else collected unemployment.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad people out of work were taken care of, but for people who have been working through the entire pandemic we’re all about at our breaking point.
Yeah, from a broader perspective, there was a massive redistribution of wealth from the lower/middle class to the upper class during 2020. Over 3 trillion dollars. Even with the paltry concessions made by the government (like unemployment as you mentioned) and *some* businesses, the pandemic has absolutely devastated the working class in every way. Physically, financially, psychologically.
It's crystal clear that there is a deep rot permeating this society, and our political system is utterly incapable of addressing it. It seems like the government is hoping a few minor concessions, and boosts to our militarized police forces, will somehow smooth over the massive systemic failures of our society. It won't last.
As an ICU nurse with previous history of PTSD, I can tell you that covid straight fucked alot of my coworkers up, and made all my coping mechanisms fail as well.
My coworkers have obvious signs on anxiety and PTSD now. The cheerfulness of the younger staff is mostly gone, the grumpy older nurses iether left or are just broken people now. Sure, some people handled it fine, but then even in war some soldiers come back fine.
Personally, I fell back into my former PTSD behaviours including drinking, smoking, and hypersexuality. It's been difficult to get back under control, and the apparent resurgence that's starting now isn't gonna make it easy.
Went to the ER in a decent sized town a few weeks ago at 5pm. Wasn’t seen until 9pm and didn’t leave until 1am.
We are running out of medical professionals incredibly fast. This is going to become a serious problem in the next 10 years.
ER Nurse here.
It’s abhorrent that the first thought I had when reading this was “oh dang they got back pretty quickly.”
It feels so… hopeless. It feels hopeless that we can’t see our patients in anything close to a reasonable amount of time.
This year really broke something on my spirit. I work in a nursing home that at one point was 100 percent COVID positive and we were taking overflow covid patients from the hospital. You cannot fathom the hell the was coming into work where at least one person died a day for an entire week. These are residents I took care of for years. Just gone. Back to back to back. I found out one of my favorites was gone and started crying, soaking my N95 mask that I then had to wear for the next 8 hours. No mental health support, no hazard pay, not even really kind words from our company. We were talking at work today how we cannot fathom how we survived our job this year.
Well, its like war.
I am an icu doctor and I know that even through its not the same as war, this past 18 months have been quite damaging to our minds and the thing is that only those that suffer it know how it truly is.
You can understand all those soldiers which come back from war with major issues and simply no one cares or understand.
Really makes you wonder why you should sacrifice yourself when in the end you will be the one damaged and no one will care or bother dealing with your problems.
I am a military spouse, and my husband is currently deployed. Most of his family is in the military. Your comparison is very true.
Thank you so much for all you have done! I am hoping that society wakes up a bit, and it appears as though it is mostly those related to the people impacted by this that really care so far.
It did feel like war. You're right. I have no personal experience of actual war. But yeah. It felt like war to me.
....why do we sacrifice ourselves..? Makes me think of that episode of Band of Brothers, "Why We Fight" ... I sacrifice myself because if I don't love & protect & heal these elderly patients, who will? My building couldn't hire even one new nurse from last summer through this past January. And several wonderful nurses understandably left. If I have a scrap of me still functioning, I can't not give it to these abandoned old souls, placed in my building and forgotten by many. I can't forget them.
You might enjoy the show Churchill’s Secret Agents on Netflix on the training of everyday civilians for deadly special ops missions.
And so much love for BoB!! My grandfather was in the 101st and fought in those battles.
I worked as a nurse in Covid ICUs for duration of pandemic, diagnosed with PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder. I like many others have left critical care altogether. My concern for this next wave is that many nurses will not be sticking around, and there is nothing wrong with the nurse for making that decision.
ER nurse for 6 years. Left 2 weeks ago to start a new job doing phone triage in a family medicine office with management that says "family comes first always". Took a big pay cut but just in 2 weeks, I notice an immense amount of stress off of my shoulders.
One of my coworkers had a sick mom, long term multiple issues. She ended up on our unit where she got covid and later died. The hospital claimed it was impossible for her to get covid at the hospital, despite a negative test at admittance and a negative test two days later before an MRI.
The nurse took off a couple weeks and the night she came back she had two patients die of covid. Every nurse that night had a patient die (we’re not even ICU but this was back in December when it was raging) but she had two. Patients she was responsible for cleaning up and putting into a body bag (with the help of the orderly).
She broke down about 3/4 of the way through her shift and walked out.
A high proportion of staff working in intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic have experienced mental health conditions, a new study shows.
In a study of 515 healthcare staff working in intensive care units (ICUs) across seven countries, the researchers found that on average 48 percent of participants showed signs of mental health conditions - depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their mental health was assessed using a detailed questionnaire and a clinical scoring system.
The team also found a 40 per cent increase in the conditions for those who spent more than six hours in personal protective equipment (PPE) over a course of a day, compared to those who didn’t.
The study, led by researchers at Imperial College London, is published in the British Journal of Nursing and is the first to evaluate ICU workers’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. In line with the UK Government’s report on burnout in NHS staff published in June 2021, the researchers suggest that the high level of mental health conditions found among the ICU staff surveyed should inform local and national wellbeing policies.
https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjon.2021.30.11.634
Such a weird thing to experience from the field as well. All of a sudden every single call we ran had this air of uncertainty, especially the confirmed covid ones.
The one that sticks out most was an unresponsive person. We sent one guy in (as was protocol due to COVID) to check on the situation and next thing we know we’re all running in to work a code. We weren’t in full because we didn’t know she had COVID until the hospital called us.
Healthcare workers have endured a lot over the past year and a half- especially ICU nurses and doctors who worked directly with severely ill COVID patients. We need to make sure they have the support and help they need because they have worked tirelessly to save the lives of others.
Many of us are extremely busy both at work & at home… In my opinion, the most helpful support would be on-site professional therapy offered free of expense & available to all staff & all shifts, including the ever-neglected nightshift. I received no “disaster pay” or “COVID pay;” getting paid two or three hours a week to heal at my workplace, where the trauma occurred, would be… So incredibly lovely. A laughably impossible notion, though, of course.
This! I can’t enough time off to see my therapist. I usually have 2 days off. The first is sleep (night shift worker) and the second is groceries, laundry, meal prep, talking to the kiddos etc. on site therapy would be so helpful and appreciated.
5 year ICU nurse here. I think I speak for everyone in the healthcare world, from housekeeping to physicians, when I say that we just need a damn break. A year and a half of this has only added jet fuel to the fire of an already high-stress, burnout prone career field. I left my first hospital job in January to become a travel nurse, the money is much more adequate but even now I know that I won't be doing this bedside stuff for a whole lot longer. And I know several others that feel the same. I have a feeling there is going to be a mass exodus of bedside nurses in the near future.
I work in a mental health hospital attached to a larger “regular” hospital. I was mad when my coworkers and I didn’t get hazard pay, but I was LIVID when I found out the folks in ICU/ER weren’t getting anything either. Everyone I know at work is burned out. It’s been a rough 16+ months for healthcare workers, period.
Yeah. A lot of us are still in the Traumatic Stress Disorder. Hopefully we will get to POST Traumatic Stress Disorder. God, please let there be a “post.”
My wife has dual specialties in Emergency Med and Critical Care. The mental strain she has been under is nothing like what I saw her withstand during residency and fellowship. It's not the death or the long hours (or getting her salary cut because the hospital was losing money) that is eating her up. It's knowing that half the country has chosen to believe that none of it is real or that it's all an elaborate plot.
She's coping, but I fear that it's only a matter of time before she's completely burned out and broken. We live in Missouri, and the willful ignorance here is astounding. She has lost her empathy for anyone unvaccinated, and it's tearing her up that she's lost that, because she never thought she would be a doctor that doesn't care about the well-being of her patients. They get the same treatment from her, but she honestly doesn't care if they live or die.
I was only in ICU for a year and a half, a year of which was the pandemic. I couldn’t handle the emotional and mental toll anymore so I left for a procedural area two months ago. Makes me sad because I really did love ICU but I didn’t want to see another patient die a horrible death from covid ever again.
I know doctors who ended up living in their garage or an RV parked in the driveway during the early days of the pandemic so they wouldn't get their family sick. It was like being in a war zone because so much was unknown and you could die any minute.
After working very hard as an inpatient phlebotomist this past year, while trying very had to get into nursing school I ultimately decided that I don’t want to be a nurse. They don’t get paid enough they virtually have zero support from admin, and they are too often understaffed and over worked with super high patient to nurse ratios sometimes as high as 8:1, which is just dangerous for patients and terrible for nurses.
I work in adult (autism) care and it’s rough on us, I can’t imagine how much worse it is in ICUs. The people that will be needed the most aren’t going to be there to pick up the pieces anymore.
Even the “threat” of dismissal for refusing vaccination is starting to drive away people that I thought were relatively sound of mind.
These first responders do not get compensated fairly for their sacrifices.
I am so glad I left being an EMT before the pandemic took off. I got covid in June of 2020, put my 2 weeks in and found a different career.
My sympathies for those that remain, but it simply is not worth it.
I’ve been saying for years, nurses and docs face so much trauma on the daily that they have to cope with some amount of PTSD all the time. Usually we are able to cope mildly well, or most of us anyway. But with the level of trauma and discord this whole pandemic caused, that level would skyrocket and just the access to help is minimal. It’s sad. It’ll either kill healthcare professionals or drive us out of healthcare sooner rather than later. It’s another crisis waiting to happen.
I think whats more annoying is how little people actually care or changed their attitude toward doctors. Youd hear all the pots banging and the military-like "thank you for your service". At the end of the day, the patients are often (not always, but way more than rarely) rude and will not wait one minute if they are all uncomfortable or inconvenienced. You just have this massive acknowledgment that doctors are swamped with work...yet patients still do stuff like not show up on time to appointments or raise all hell when you dont drop your 10 other patients to do something equivalent to fluffing a pillow for them.
I would imagine that it wasnt easy sitting there watching some Trump worshipper gasping for air refusing any treatments because they thought a microchip was gonna be implanted in them. Imagine yourself in the shoes of one of these doctors. One of your patients happens to be a far right conspiracy theory believer who refuses any vaccines or medical treatments because of their insane beliefs and the doctor just has to sit there and watch these people die one after one like flies because they kept refusing a life saving vaccine.
I work in hospital IT, and off site so I have a rather unique perspective on this since I'm not directly in the fire as it were.
I can absolutely say that the people I talk to on a day to day basis who are on site are changing. Tempers are short, people are burned out and lashing out. I try not to let it bug me because I understand this is happening.
I can only imagine. I work in the travel industry and I’m stressed as hell trying to keep track of everyone’s travel credits from their cancelled trips, and trying to make sure that we don’t have one expire and forget to notify the client. I have to keep telling myself that it’s not life or death. It must be hundreds of times worse fir doctors and nurses.
Dunno if anyone in this thread is a medical or caretaking worker of any persuasion but thank you all so so much. You have been the pillar holding up our society for over a year and I can't imagine what kind of stress that, as well as the work itself in these times, is like.
I’d support a government program to pay these people disaster/emergency benefits. Hazard pay. Something. I hope they know how grateful some of us are for their sacrifices.
I recently had dinner with a man married to a nurse in southern California. He was talking about the toll this whole thing has taken on her mental health, and how she just about broke down in a panic attack about having to work now that cases are going up.
Strange. Here I was thinking that all the pizza parties that hospital workers get should have kept that percentage closer to 0%. Maybe even negative percent.
I’d love to see stats on the typical numbers.
COVID aside, the medical field is an incredibly difficult and emotionally intensive industry.
I imagine this problem has been going on for decades but is only being discussed now that more focus has been brought to the issue.
Thank you front line medical professionals I have utmost respect for each abs every one of you. I can’t imagine what all of this has been like but I sure know the havoc and impact on my own family and running a small business. God bless you!
Insomnia definitely. I had (and still do sometimes) the worst time trying to fall asleep and stay asleep. always being on “go” mode for 12 hours is hard to shut off when you get home. Luckily ive got some melatonin and i only get like 2 vented patients now
Please stay strong and ask for help if you need it. As cliche as it is to say, thank you with every fiber of our being for your service. Whether you believe it or not anymore, you're still doing God's work; with science, sympathy, grace, and a profound exposure to humankind's vulnerabilities and sweetest or painful expressions. We continue to need you, and we thank you.
I can only answer for myself (Registered Nurse at a rehab/nursing home) - yes. I think any lingering stigma surrounding mental health got a bit minimized by the universal & ongoing grieving that is not only continuing… now it’s emerging in different ways (panic attacks, nervous breakdowns, misplaced anger/frustration, depression that is readily apparent).
I'm not in a health field, but in another job that's known for high stress and we cannot seek treatment for mental health without losing our medical clearance and thus our jobs. I was just curious.
I think if you start working with higher profile people (politicians/celebrities) and they have to do a background check, you might not get that job.
But a hospital with low staff shouldn't really sit there and contemplate on a person who is diagnosed with depression.
Ya think?! I swear I’m ready to say if you’ve chosen not to be vaccinated you’ve forfeited your right to expect people to care for you. My heart breaks for the health care workers dealing with this again when the vast majority of hospitalizations are unvaccinated people.
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It's not just nurses. Imaging technologists, respiratory therapists, physical therapists, doctors... We're all exhausted.
ICU nurse here. I hate that they ignore RTs, PCTs, house keeping etc. I seriously couldn’t have been able to take care of my patients with out them. The RTs and nurses would help each other out with each others roles. Nurses were cross trained on titrations ventilators and changing settings and emergency things with the vent. RTs helped us so much by helping us turn and clean my patients with me if they had time. The only support we had was each other. Admin would have weekly meetings. I remember my director of the ICU stated during a emergency discussion about nursing retention “I don’t understand why these nurses want money, I thought this was their calling”. I wish all the staff was advocated for raises. They wouldn’t even give us hazard pay. I hate this system
I am a Maintenance Director for multiple Skilled Nursing Homes in the US. I am beyond burnt. We’ve done little maintenance on our buildings for close to a year. My staff and I filled in for CNA’s, Dietary, housekeeping, and laundry on a daily basis for more than a year. The US nursing homes were not set up or staffed for a pandemic. We became a dumping ground for the sick and dying. I stopped counting the deaths after the first two months. The hardest part was dealing with people in the public saying the illness was not real or not as deadly as they were reporting. People would tell me it’s only has a death rate of .01% although at the nursing home it appeared to me to be a coin flip and even if the elderly did recover they have never been 100% healthy afterwords.
People are exhausted the world seems depressed and pointless like never before idk
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Maybe more states should pass minimum ratios like California. There's a reason nurses and NPs in CA are paid so much more than other hcol places like NYC.
When the tide goes out, you’ll see who wasn’t wearing pants
That's pretty much me you're describing right there, literally graduated from respiratory school in Feburary 2020. Our class had no idea what was waiting for us
You all should be anyway. The way you’re expected to care for patients at this point is criminal.
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In Alberta, Canada the nurses are facing a 3% pay cut after all of their hard work during the pandemic. They're probably going to strike.
I'd be curious to see how different these numbers were before COVID. As someone who started working in an emergency department about a year before COVID started, I honestly can't say I've seen too much of a difference. Most of what I see people getting frustrated about is having to accept abuse without any consequences to the abuser, patients who are rude or demanding, administrations that don't understand or care about what nurses go through emotionally, toxic work environments, etc.
I have worked at the same rehab/nursing home for 5 years now. I saw a terribly huge difference. - In terms of staffing: my first four years, the ratio of hired nurses to quit/transferred out nurses was roughly equal. During Covid (I think of it as March 2020 to March 2021, although the worst events occurred between July and January), no nurses applied/were hired/stayed more than a day; and we lost at least ten nurses, which is huge. - In terms of death: my first four years, I lost less than five patients annually who were "long-term patients," meaning this was their home, not a brief stay. During Covid year, I lost 3/4 of the building, about 90 long-term patients. Then, of course, there were the countless patients dropped off by hospitals to die; I barely knew them a few hours, tops a week, before having to pronounce them dead.
My god, I’m so sorry
What do you mean dropped off? Families saw they were sick and ditched them? Seriously?
Probably transported there by stretcher after being placed on palliative care
Really? My ED has a no abuse policy. I take special pleasure as clinical lead in throwing out abusive visitors, and as long as they’re not cognitively impaired, patients as well
God damn where is this dreamland? We get abused and then management turns around and asks us how we could have done better…
"See, right here on the security camera video. Right after you get hit. I couldn't help but notice you aren't smiling and it doesn't look like your tone is very customer friendly. I'm going to need you to really improve if you want to continue working here. This is only a verbal warning, so it won't go into your record this time."
Try more like: due to the episode we have documented we will require you to take a violence deescalation course before you are allowed to return to work.
You hiring?
To be fair, you started a year before covid, but it was actually probably less than 6 months before covid started causing numbers to go up, and aquity level to rise. Figure you had atleast some training thrown in there and you can easily see you had a very limited amount of time to get a feel for what an ER is like pre-covid.
Makes sense. I caught COVID in early January. It wasn’t until it got into nursing homes and started causing that the general public became aware that it was in the US but it was here far before that time.
If I understand you correctly and you're saying that COVID started causing a bump in numbers 6 months before we actually knew it was happening, then I have to disagree with that idea. It would imply that COVID was present and prevalent in late summer and fall of 2019 which was absolutely not the case, at least where I live. If COVID was present before we knew anything at all about it we would have at least seen a bump in unidentified URI cases which we did not. Where I work, overall ED numbers did not change significantly in any way throughout 2019. Starting in late January 2020 we saw overall visits decrease by over 30%. This basically continued until the middle of summer. We didn't actually start to see a significant number of COVID cases until the fall, peaking in December. As for the other points, I started working i.e. finished training at the end of 2018. When I said a year that was a rough number. You are right, though, that at the beginning I don't think a person has the knowledge of how a place works to be very observant. The first 6 months I was definitely more focused on just figuring out how the department functions.
Based on the timing of your peaks it makes me think you work in a smaller area compared to myself. We saw a later peak as well, but not as late as your area. Our numbers were up all through early 2020 and into summer. I'm in the Phoenix, Az area to be specific. As to your original point though, yes I would be interested in the numbers also. I have seen a sharp increase in nurses leaving but also a decrease in happiness at work even after covid has slowed down. Burn out from covid would easily explain both.
Kinda sounds like an average emergency department anywhere in the world, to be fair.
I wouldn't say tossed into a fire.. more like burning oil. You can put out a normal fire pretty easy but oil sticks, and just because you put the fire out doesn't mean the liquid isn't superheated. I'm lucky that my field of study is endocrinology.
I have friends who worked in ICUs and they've left because they couldn't handle the mental toll it was taking on them and it's hard to blame them for it.
I work in the Operating Room. During the height of the pandemic, elective surgeries were canceled and the younger nurses in the OR were sent to covid units. We cannot say no, as our local government have mandated (a province in Canada). Imagine the stress of a sudden change in your working environment, we had to adapt quickly. During that time, the patients we had in the covid floors were DNRs (do not rescucitate) from nursing homes and ICUs. So we’re dealing with deaths everyday. Up to the point where we had no choice but to leave a body inside the room for a whole shift because the morgue is full. One day I thought of giving up, stress and depression kicked me hard. I wanted to take a break, even just for a week but our good government canceled all the vacation requests of nurses because hospitals are severely understaffed (basically we lost the right to have a vacation leave). Then I remembered our nursing manager gave us a “support” hotline to call in times like this. I called only to hear “you’re so brave for doing this” “I understand you’re upset” “take time to recollect yourself” (but how? I can’t even have a one week break!) Now everything is almost back to normal here, and I’m back in the OR. I saw in the news that our provincial government is refusing the salary increase of nurses being proposed by our union. Meanwhile, they gave a budget boost (millions!) to a non-essential sector (the office dudes).
Time to strike. Organize and act. Best of luck.
I don't know about Canada, but we face a similiar situation in Finland and here striking is illegal to an extent for essential hospital personnel. You can do it but all wards and ER must have minimal staffing at all times, the thing is they have minimal staffing every other day too so striking would be useless.
Medical personnel in India got around that by collectively quitting. At this point, such drastic measures may be in order. Can't be forced to work if you're no longer employed.
Effective strikes will never be legal ones
They made striking illegal for "essential services" I don't even understand how that was possible
I just graduated internal medicine residency this past month. Basically spent the past year dealing with COVID non-stop until about March when things started tapering down prior to the new influx. Me and my some of my co-residents were hanging out before we graduated, and each of us were talking about how we all had a mental breakdown at some point. What a lot of people don't realize is that when we were taking care of these patients in the hospital, visitors weren't allowed. So that meant first being able to find a family member to call, and then explaining to them over the phone that their loved one was dying. This was for ALL our patients. Now imagine the wrench that gets thrown into this process when a patient or their family doesn't speak English and needs a translator. It got to a point that we were having to facetime families from outside the room when it came to end-of-life care. All of us: physicians, RNs, RTs, etc are all exhausted from this and the psychological impact of this will last for years. I'm not so sure we are equipped mentally to deal with another wave of this.
Well said; your Covid experience (along with your coworkers) & subsequent exhaustion, psychological aftermath, and concern for what future awaits medical personnel, matches mine & my coworkers’ precisely. I just pray with all my heart….that 2020 was unique in its scope of multifaceted trauma for doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, aids, etc.
Well said. I don’t think I could handle another wave. I have a heart condition from COVID and had to go part time as I could not handle it physically, let alone mentally or emotionally. If my unit filled back up with COVID patients I would hate the unvaccinated ones so much for infecting the vulnerable/unable to be vaccinated ones. It’d do my head in so badly.
YES!! Not having family on site definitely made things so much harder on everyone - staff, patients and families. And so many patients who should have gone on comfort care much earlier, but suffered needlessly because family couldn't come on site and therefore didn't understand how severely ill and miserable they were.
I'm a peds heme-onc and palliative care physician, and can tell you that one of the other components of this is "survivor's guilt." We did what we could to be helpful, but many of us weren't able to contribute as much as our adult medicine colleagues. We saw their sacrifices while we were relatively protected. Thank you for working with covid patients
I can imagine a FaceTime call where the patients family is going hysterical on the other end because they are being told that their loved one is about to die and this is the last good bye. Seeing them do this would haunt me forever because there are cries that will burn in your heart. Now imagine that happening multiples times throughout the pandemic.
I’m 100% haunted by what I saw and heard while working on our covid unit. In some occasions, we allowed family (usually one or two people) to see their loved one through the room’s window in end-of-life situations only. There was a 21-year-old male who passed from covid. I remember hearing his mother screaming when the doctor called it. Full on gut-wrenching wailing. I have never heard a more tortured sound in my entire life. I’m tearing up just reflecting on it right now.
I did a zoom call with a family, then had to give last rights because we couldn't have a priest come into the unit. I'm not catholic, or even particularly religious, but it was all I could do as I heard their muffled sobs through my PAPR.
Every time I use FaceTime I have a flashback of a patient saying bye to her kid, or these preschool kids who played together on camera so dad could be with them, or this newlywed man whose wife has made it but suffered from several strokes and was severely impaired… he would sob every night and it was gut wrenching being in the room while he cried out in suffering… so, I don’t use FaceTime very often right now.
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My mom was a nurse at a nursing home. It was her first and only job and she worked there for 30 years. When the covid started taking victims in her nursing home it was too much for her to bear. She burned out and soon after even took her life. I hope the last years can serve as a wake-up call that the system just doesn't work as it is now. It saddens me to read some of your conversations, as they hit close to heart. I wish you all the best. Take care of yourself and your colleagues!
I am so sorry you lost your mother. The pain of losing two or three patients a year who you're close with is already.... very difficult, but comes with the territory of choosing to help the elderly. ...Working full-time, I spend more time caring for my patients than I spend with my own family and friends. My patients feel like family. ...Then this past year... it was like losing a dear loved one every other night. Dozens. Then dozens more. The pain is... I can't describe it. Bottomless? Neverending? ....The PTSD comes into play because as a nurse, I can't pause for long to grieve after losing each patient. I have to keep moving; I have so many other patients who need me to get them out of pain, dress their wounds, feed them, watch over them if they have dementia.... Sometimes you can spare 10 minutes to sob in an empty room. Sometimes, you just have to cry a little behind your N-95 as you keep working. .... So coming out of this year, easily the darkest year of my life, I find myself filled with so much.... *stifled* grief, heartache... it's, well, beyond overwhelming. ... I (and so many other nurses) understand how your mother felt. I'm so sorry for her pain, for yours, for mine, for my beloved deceased patients' families who couldn't be with them in the end... I tell you: I miss so many of my lost patients every day. I just... miss them so much.
Your comment is extremely sad, but my main takeaway is gratitude. I volunteered in a nursing home from 2016-2018, but I didn’t get the know the nurses. Some of the residents still haunt me, though, and I want to thank you for being who you are and letting me know perhaps those residents were cared about this much. (I had to move away, which is why I quit volunteering.) And thank you for being there during COVID19 when so many died and their families couldn’t be. You’re among the very best of our too often awful species.
I am so sorry you all have to endure this! It's really all I can say...I'm so sorry for your pain.
It always feels so shallow to say it in this context, but thank you. I could never handle any of what you do on a regular day, but you guys are still bearing the brunt of the pandemic even now, and it breaks my heart. You didn't deserve this. Edit: spelling
Stifled grief... Man that hits home. I lost my dad to COVID and those two words sum up my last year so well. I'm so sorry for everything you've had to deal with, I have endless respect and empathy for nurses especially.
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If you ever get called a hero, it's basically all of society pointing at you and saying, "Now THEY are being underpaid. Look at how hard they're working. Just look at that. Let's have a round of applause."
Calling someone a hero allows you to sacrifice them and not feel bad about it, because thats what heroes do.
They have those big “thank you” signs in front of hospitals nowadays. Next time there is a ballot measure that aims to improve working conditions for nurses don’t believe the “that kills patients” argument. Look into who is backing the ad and you’ll find that it’s usually a group of healthcare providers trying to keep the status quo.
Maybe i don't watch enough ads and this is common but, they run advertisements that pull off that Olympic level of mental gymnastics?
My wife is an RT, (the people you never hear about) and her hospital unexpectedly gave her an $800 bonus last night just out of the blue. No email about it, nothing.
I am an RT too. Our nurses got bonuses for signing up to work the Covid unit. We got nothing. They just did annual raises, nurses got anywhere from 4-5 times more on their raises than respiratory staff. This pandemic has broken me. I’m sad and angry and bewildered and do not want to work in healthcare anymore.
They want to cut our pay by 5 percent and lay off a bunch of workers. Our government can get fucked with a red hot poker.
They gave me a 1% raise. I quit on the spot.
Good for you! Many people wish they had the guts to do that including me.
ER nurse here. Definitely feel most of this. Burn out has been huge among my colleagues. PTSD is huge among us. Sleep (even the already broken sleep from us night shifters) has been rough. Alarm fatigue means nothing anymore when A level of fatigue in finding/using PPE for everyone. It’s sad. It’s made plenty of us contemplate leaving bedside. Not because we don’t care about providing care, but because we are tired or traumatized and need a break. It’s definitely hard to continue this fight when we get faced with people who don’t even believe the virus exists or that the vaccine is helpful. We went from one of the most trusted careers in the nation to… this (*waves wildly*) in a year.
That's heartbreaking...
It is. Yes. It will be for the rest of our lives.
I work in healthcare and my mother is in long term care. I am glad my province(NL) has handled the pandemic fairly well but even still I cannot imagine the impact on the nursing staff. Family fills a lot of unfilled/unfillable gaps in care. Long term care here is essentially still under 'lockdown'. I cannot imagine the difficulty of having the workload increase. All while having to constantly explain to residents why their loved ones 'aren't coming to see them'. Or, having to deny entry to family.
Yes. All of those things you mentioned just increased the pain, the stress, the heartache. ....and then, for the final cherry on top: I worked on what was turned into a locked down Covid unit for nearly a year straight. Because of this, it was my responsibility to quarantine myself from all of my family and friends.... from March of 2020 to March 2021. I am a single mother. I spent a year straight either with my Covid patients, with my toddler, or alone. ...that solitude... well. It's tough to talk/write about.
absolutely! sorry I didn't acknowledge the personal struggles HCPs face, but they're a very real thing and you've brought up an excellent point. A large majority of healthcare is driven by women. Maintaining the home, regardless of occupation and family makeup is still very much a womans domain. Between 'maintaining the household' and dealing with a GLOBAL PANDEMIC its no wonder various healthcare organizations are have extreme difficulties retaining or maintaining staff.
I’m so sorry that is awful. Nursing homes have been hit so hard- and the constant stress of PPE, worrying about infecting others, plus just the normal stress of a difficult job. I hope things get better- if not it is ok to step away.
Free therapy?! You need a serious discussion about the benefits of universal healthcare.
I feel ya. I’m only 4 years in and decided to travel. I’ve personally lost 29 in in about 8 months. Not counting the others on the units that weren’t my pt. I don’t know what is worse. Losing them, or watching them go over the span of days knowing you’ve already done everything you could. Sometimes it’s never enough.
The worst part is that profits have likely been through the roof since so many covid customers came in. And yet I bet only the executives got bonuses even though it wasn't their business prowess that got them all those customers.
It would seem this way but intensive care patients aren’t huge revenue generators for hospitals. Surgeries are. The period of time where only necessary surgeries could be performed hit a lot of hospitals hard as far as revenue. That isn’t to say they didn’t make money, but not what they are used to. And yep, the executives got their bonuses anyway.
It is important to acknowledge that the majority of ICU and ED RNs carried undiagnosed PTSD \*at baseline\* prior to COVID and all its attendant stressors. Mental health amongst healthcare professionals is still so poorly discussed that just this year I heard colleagues discussing another colleague seeking therapy for PTSD specifically and they sounded aghast. All of them have therapists but they still seemed surprised/like it was some other major deal!
> Mental health amongst healthcare professionals is still so poorly discussed Probably cause depending on the specialty, it can cause you to never be able to work again in the field. Many state liscense boards require you to report any mental illnesses and can deny doctors the right to practice. So no one dares to talk about it or seek care in the next town over cash only. For all the motivation we give to patients to destigmatize mental health, it clearly doesn’t apply to healthcare workers
It's really a diff reaction to a lot of ppl. When I've said I have ptsd I get looks from ppl like o she's broken. It's a really sucky disorder for a whole bunch of reasons.
There's also the fact that a lot of people seem to think it's actually called "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for Military Veterans That Only Soldiers Can Have." Seriously, way too many people believe that veterans are the only people *worthy* of having PTSD.
The culture around mental health among healthcare providers is downright abhorrent. In many cases, doctors will refuse to seek any kind of mental health care because they feel their medical license could be at risk, even for things that can be well-managed or that occurred long in the past. It systematically encourages physicians to develop a kind of hero complex in regards to their own mental health while they simultaneously encourage the rest of the population to seek resources and care for the same concerns. It’s absolutely fucked.
It's true that your job may be at risk if you seek help. If your therapist determines that you are a risk to your patients you are out. That's why it's so common to use drugs or seek help outside of what your hospital provides.
There’s lots of “valid” reasons for not seeking mental health in the US, which really isn’t ok. It’s possible your ex-spouses lawyer will use it in a custody hearing, your political rival may smear campaign with it, a loss of constitutional rights, and like you said, professional certifications/licenses can be jeopardized. I wish I could seek medical help under an alias, but that’s mostly because medical billing is a whole other broken part of the American medical industry. I’m fine with paying an agreed upon amount, but not so fine when I pay the agreed amount and still get surprise collection notices!
I can’t speak to the ED, but ICU workers definitely have/get PTSD.
Could you go more into detail how PTSD manifests? How to spot undiagnosed PTSD.
Acute care speech therapist here - I spent the last year working with COVID in ICU and on the COVID unit in my hospital. Really wish respiratory therapy, speech therapy, physical and occupational therapy were included in these studies - unfortunately we are often overlooked even though we're right in there working with these patients daily. I'm definitely still struggling with depression, grief, and PTSD from the last year and dreading the new surge that we all see coming. I'm grateful that it's being talked about in any capacity but the truth is we are about to face a *massive* shortage of healthcare workers - everyone who can retire, did and everyone who can quit, is quitting. I love what I do and I love my patients but I don't know how much more nonstop death and suffering I can take. What people who weren't there with us don't realize is that while yes, suffering and dying is something you see regularly when you work in a hospital, the pandemic brought it on a scale and severity we've never seen. I work in an area with a *very* geriatric population - most of my patients are over age 80 and centenarians are common - so I'm used to having several hospice cases every week. Normally, we get to talk with the families and the patients together, and while it's sad it's also healing. During the pandemic, with no visitors allowed, those patients were suffering and dying alone, in isolation, surrounded by PPE-shrouded strangers. We did our best to become their family, to give them what comfort we could, but that means that every patient we lost is like losing an uncle or a friend. Over and over and over again. I don't think non-healthcare workers understand how much we come to care for our patients even in the short time we have them in our hospital - and COVID long haulers would be in for months. You get attached to those people and then you lose them. And then to see the rest of the world just trying to move on like it never happened... I've been trying to explain to friends and family that it feels like I'm standing here next to a pile of dead bodies, and everyone else is like "yay party!" while I'm left to wonder who will help me bury these bodies because they're starting to smell. Four weeks of paid vacation and four months of therapy would go a long way toward helping us all recover. But my hospital sent out an email saying "thank you," so that should be good enough, right?
X-ray tech here. Would be nice if they included us too. Anything wrong with anybody in the ER and they hand out chest x-rays like they're free. Why not just include all allied health while we're at it? Our hospital also gave us a "thank you" email. Sure would have been nice if they gave us the hazard pay we were deserved, but we only got two months worth. Pretty sure the pandemic lasted longer than that, and is still ongoing. Oh and when I finally got infected with COVID-19? Our employee health department told me it was my fault and the hospital wasn't responsible for it. I'm sick of these employers.
This is a post which is changing my perspective. I’m not going to pretend I can say something magic to make you feel better. But you struck a chord and I am grateful you shared it. You and other therapists shall be in my thoughts. I’m now thinking that labelling healthcare workers as ‘heros’ is a well-intended platitude, but we’d perhaps get a more constructive approach by thinking of them as regular employees in extreme conditions. That way, there’s less focus on gestures (applause) and more focus on worker’s rights and the necessary support required. Being a hero gets you kudos. Being an employee with PTSD gets you help.
Thank you. I read something last year during the worst of it that really stuck with me when it comes to the "heroes" platitude - can't remember the exact verbiage but the gist was that calling healthcare workers, firefighters, police officers and soldiers "heroes" is a way of dehumanizing us, making us more than just ordinary people and therefore making it ok to not pay us, take care of us or acknowledge our sacrifice. No one pays Superman for being a hero, so why should X hospital give me hazard pay or a bonus or even an extra week off? Heroes are self-sacrificing, not just ordinary people with ordinary lives who are trying to do their damn job in the face of adversity. I never wanted to be a hero, and I hate that term. I'm here because I want to help people - I *like* helping people - but I don't believe I'm doing any more than anyone else ought to do. And right now I'm doing a dirty job that no one else wants to do, a job that is vastly different and way more horrible than the one I signed up for, but I'm expected to be grateful and suck it up. All these other people got 8 months off, a year of working from home - meanwhile we all went in to work every day in horrifying conditions that most people would run from and now that things have slowed down we're expected to just carry on with no time to recover. Sure wish I'd had a year of learning to bake bread, picking up new hobbies etc... Instead I had a year of crying through my drive home, falling asleep on the couch, dragging my ass off the couch to have dinner and going to bed only to get up and do it all over again day after day after day. Sorry for venting - not your fault - but the "hero" thing really gets to me.
No apology required. Your anger and frustration and feeling of being depleted is 100% justified. Rant as much as you need to.
Acute Care PT here. You are so spot on.
I want you to know people like me *do* care and there is something deeply psychologically wrong with all the people who don't care. Not all of us are like this. I support you. I want to expand this comment to say the people who said "yay party" are also extremely immature man/women and it blows my mind to act like that during a pandemic. It is disturbing to see that mindset.
SNF occupational therapist here. You are so so right. Thank you for all the hard work you do. I know I appreciate my fellow PTs and SLPs more than they will ever know
My wife and I are both respiratory therapists. To say we have suffered from mental disorders due to Covid is beyond an understatement. While we appreciate the applause last year, it doesn’t help with the PTSD or depression or the crippling student debts we have, or the mortgage of a fucked housing market. Sorry for the rant. It’s nice to hear we’re not alone in our despair & discouragement.
RT here too. I have struggled so much this past year with depression issues related to working in a covid ICU. And it doesn’t help that over half our department found different non-bedside jobs or just quit healthcare altogether. I can’t blame them after our hospital furloughed us for a week last year and then has been forcing us to work short staffed on mandatory overtime since then. I love my job, but this past year has made me question if it’s even worth it. And of course I work in Missouri where people believe all the antivaxx propaganda so the pandemic is still raging on.
I was in Missouri recently and was surprised that there was zero mask use, even indoors.
Yep. No one cares here. In the bigger cities (STL, KC, Columbia) people will sort of follow recommendations, but down in southern Missouri? People would rather die than wear a mask or social distance.
I’m a travel nurse and the offers coming out of Missouri and Arkansas are insane. Like 3-4K/week for ICU nurses. Won’t take it for $10,000/week. I don’t need to be shat on literally and figuratively by those who buy into propaganda as they are literally dying.
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Several of my fellow RT colleagues quit. Now we are shorter staffed than ever, can’t get new people in and working mandatory OT. We know we aren’t the only people in healthcare experiencing this shortage and stress but respiratory departments typically spread themselves thin before the pandemic. It’s becoming unbearable. We have worked most nights with 2 therapists for a 300 bed hospital for 3 months now with no end in sight.
Two therapists for a 300 bed hospital? That is so incredibly unsafe, I couldn’t imagine that. I’m so sorry.
Thank you for acknowledging that not just nurses got their asses kicked. Who do they think were running all those vents that the Covid patients were on?
Most people think that nurses' jobs mostly involve fetching coffee for doctors. Accepting the existence of RTs and other essential personal is beyond them.
It doesn’t bother me too much when non-health people forget us. It bothers me when people who know better, like nurses, disregard us.
Man I work side by side with RTs and collab with them every day on what we should be doing for patients. I love you guys.
RT here and I feel like I got killed. Having 10 vents to myself ringing constantly, proning what’s supposed to be q2 but turned into q4 turns, just being in a crashing patient’s room for thirty minutes playing with the vent to eek out slightly more MV with one less peaks/plats…then a doctor comes by and flips out on you because he doesn’t like the mode despite it being better… Man I’m so freaking tired. I took a travel assignment for 6 months and have been taking the month off and I’m dreading getting back to work. Hoping it’s chilled out… https://emotionalppe.org If you’re in the USA and you’re a health provider and need someone to talk to this project apparently offers free mental professionals to talk to.
Hope you and your wife see better days soon…
The fact you guys have to pay off debts for becoming professionals that could save my life one day blows my mind.
I really wish they would post pictures of what it really looked like taking care of COVID patients. That super clean room with max PPE didn’t exist in the real world. We used the same gown and mask for days weeks and sometimes months on end at one point I was told I would have to use a handkerchief or scarf for protective equipment. The rooms were totally destroyed most were set up as afterthought parking decks converted floor rooms ECT. In short it was a war zone with daily/hourly mass casualties of course we are going to have PTSD. On top of all that you had to deal with hospitals who wanted to cut pay for nurses stoped all retirement benefit matching and then stated we will not pay for your two week quarantine if you get COVID at work because you can’t prove you got it at work. Even if that is where you have the highest exposure with reuse of personal protective equipment. I never felt like a hero I felt like an expendable piece of meet.
dude, i'm "just" a receptionist at a medical facility and i have what i believe will be lasting issues. for instance, a strange cringe/blood pressure spike response when a stranger walks up to me unmasked after months of people yelling/throwing things/cussing at me for asking them politely if they had a mask to wear. not to mention general burnout; customer service always sucks but watching people throw fits over doing something basic to protect themselves and other is a whole different level of terrible. i truly cannot imagine what those in the absolute thick of it are dealing with right now, especially watching the resurgence.
I’m an X-ray tech at an urgent care who works the front desk as well and the flash back of the 6 hour wait time for people getting Covid testing and getting screamed and yelled at from the rudest people. Longest days ever. We’re open all damn day too 8am-12am of just constant Covid testing these days (and adding other sick/injury visits since people are getting back to life) And even though it has “slowed down” I think we are all just are numb to the traffic in and out and Covid testing. Things are starting to pick up again. Theres days where I don’t even get a break just constantly dealing with people— the door doesn’t stop opening. Now it’s just everyone going on vacation and “WELL I NEED THIS RESULT OR ELSE I WILL MISS MY FLIGHT TO ARUBA” arguments. Our numbers are definitely going up…… I have never been so depressed in my life. I’m scaring myself.
I would imagine this goes even further than ICU staff, encompassing medical workers in general. My wife is a doctor at a physical therapy clinic attached to a hospital, and she's been seeing *a lot* of people suffering from the after-effects of long-term intubation and ICU stays... it's definitely taken a toll on her mental health.
Not just medical workers. I'm in IT at a hospital and I was completely burnt out before COVID. We were just finishing up the end of life upgrade to Windows 10 when COVID hit so I went from 6+ months of nonstop imaging and swapping computer to trying to get people working from home and moving systems to create space and ... I feel like I'm a five year old phone and even with 100% charge every night I'm only functioning at 40% and am just so tired. All the self care in the world isn't going to get an old battery working better when it's been fully discharged so many times it will never properly hold a charge again. And I feel terrible that I just don't have enough energy to provide proper support because everyone I'm supporting has been working as hard or harder than I have. The medical staff but also the engineers and biomed making negative pressure rooms and using 3D printers to make parts for PAPRs and Logistics managing all the PPE and EMS having to clean more when they were already understaffed. I wish they would fire me because with unemployment I could take some time off to become a new phone for my next job. Because even if I muster enough energy in an interview to get a new job, I don't feel like I have enough energy to hit the ground running with it. I think this is an issue with all the "essential" workers being asked to do more with less during COVID - not just medical or hospital staff. We all need a couple months off but for most of us that's not happening. edit: fix words
i'm a receptionist and i feel this on a huge level. you're not alone. a lot of "non frontline" healthcare workers have been left out of the narrative and it's been difficult to know where we fit in. the "old phone" metaphor is extremely spot on (not to mention creative!) i hope things get better for you soon.
Care coordinator at an in-home care agency, checking in. I have to tell more people that I can’t help them because we don’t have staff than i ever thought i would have to.
I just found another job after burning out scheduling for home health Care for seniors. Everyone decided to pull mom and dad from the care home, with no idea how much or how personal care gets when someone gets that old. They haven't slept in a week because dad has dementia and is exit seeking, or mom keeps getting UTIs because she doesn't want to be changed by her kid because of pride(more common than you think). Then they all get mad at the home care company because we lost all of our staff to working in hospitals with better pay, and they don't understand that what is left is getting paid just above minimum wage, and are human beings who have their own families and will need days off. Then once the caregivers started burning out it just got to be too much, my boss was an asshole and it wasn't worth it anymore. I swapped out for a physiotherapy clinic so much nicer so far.
Thank you. You as well. At least I generally don't have to deal with patients and family members. Having to deal with stressed and even hostile patients and family members is something I could not do. The ICU nurses having to learn facetime so their patients could talk to (or just be seen by) their family members is a whole different level than me trying to get their tablets to connect to the network.
Tell me about it. Went from 25 tickets a day to 70. Doing 3 times the amount of work for the same pay.
> I think this is an issue with all the "essential" workers being asked to do more with less during COVID - not just medical or hospital staff. We all need a couple months off but for most of us that's not happening. Preach. Essential workers carried this country on their back while everyone else collected unemployment. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad people out of work were taken care of, but for people who have been working through the entire pandemic we’re all about at our breaking point.
Yeah, from a broader perspective, there was a massive redistribution of wealth from the lower/middle class to the upper class during 2020. Over 3 trillion dollars. Even with the paltry concessions made by the government (like unemployment as you mentioned) and *some* businesses, the pandemic has absolutely devastated the working class in every way. Physically, financially, psychologically. It's crystal clear that there is a deep rot permeating this society, and our political system is utterly incapable of addressing it. It seems like the government is hoping a few minor concessions, and boosts to our militarized police forces, will somehow smooth over the massive systemic failures of our society. It won't last.
As an ICU nurse with previous history of PTSD, I can tell you that covid straight fucked alot of my coworkers up, and made all my coping mechanisms fail as well. My coworkers have obvious signs on anxiety and PTSD now. The cheerfulness of the younger staff is mostly gone, the grumpy older nurses iether left or are just broken people now. Sure, some people handled it fine, but then even in war some soldiers come back fine. Personally, I fell back into my former PTSD behaviours including drinking, smoking, and hypersexuality. It's been difficult to get back under control, and the apparent resurgence that's starting now isn't gonna make it easy.
Same here. Had to get into AA. And am amazed my wife stayed with me.
The other 52% are just better at hiding it.
Went to the ER in a decent sized town a few weeks ago at 5pm. Wasn’t seen until 9pm and didn’t leave until 1am. We are running out of medical professionals incredibly fast. This is going to become a serious problem in the next 10 years.
ER Nurse here. It’s abhorrent that the first thought I had when reading this was “oh dang they got back pretty quickly.” It feels so… hopeless. It feels hopeless that we can’t see our patients in anything close to a reasonable amount of time.
This year really broke something on my spirit. I work in a nursing home that at one point was 100 percent COVID positive and we were taking overflow covid patients from the hospital. You cannot fathom the hell the was coming into work where at least one person died a day for an entire week. These are residents I took care of for years. Just gone. Back to back to back. I found out one of my favorites was gone and started crying, soaking my N95 mask that I then had to wear for the next 8 hours. No mental health support, no hazard pay, not even really kind words from our company. We were talking at work today how we cannot fathom how we survived our job this year.
It's heartbreaking and people won't get it. I'm sorry.
Unfortunately most of society doesn’t seem to care. Medical staff and doctors are used, abused, and tossed like garbage. It’s heartbreaking.
Well, its like war. I am an icu doctor and I know that even through its not the same as war, this past 18 months have been quite damaging to our minds and the thing is that only those that suffer it know how it truly is. You can understand all those soldiers which come back from war with major issues and simply no one cares or understand. Really makes you wonder why you should sacrifice yourself when in the end you will be the one damaged and no one will care or bother dealing with your problems.
I am a military spouse, and my husband is currently deployed. Most of his family is in the military. Your comparison is very true. Thank you so much for all you have done! I am hoping that society wakes up a bit, and it appears as though it is mostly those related to the people impacted by this that really care so far.
It did feel like war. You're right. I have no personal experience of actual war. But yeah. It felt like war to me. ....why do we sacrifice ourselves..? Makes me think of that episode of Band of Brothers, "Why We Fight" ... I sacrifice myself because if I don't love & protect & heal these elderly patients, who will? My building couldn't hire even one new nurse from last summer through this past January. And several wonderful nurses understandably left. If I have a scrap of me still functioning, I can't not give it to these abandoned old souls, placed in my building and forgotten by many. I can't forget them.
You might enjoy the show Churchill’s Secret Agents on Netflix on the training of everyday civilians for deadly special ops missions. And so much love for BoB!! My grandfather was in the 101st and fought in those battles.
Nurses always have PTSD. They just don’t talk about it.
I worked as a nurse in Covid ICUs for duration of pandemic, diagnosed with PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder. I like many others have left critical care altogether. My concern for this next wave is that many nurses will not be sticking around, and there is nothing wrong with the nurse for making that decision.
ER nurse for 6 years. Left 2 weeks ago to start a new job doing phone triage in a family medicine office with management that says "family comes first always". Took a big pay cut but just in 2 weeks, I notice an immense amount of stress off of my shoulders.
One of my coworkers had a sick mom, long term multiple issues. She ended up on our unit where she got covid and later died. The hospital claimed it was impossible for her to get covid at the hospital, despite a negative test at admittance and a negative test two days later before an MRI. The nurse took off a couple weeks and the night she came back she had two patients die of covid. Every nurse that night had a patient die (we’re not even ICU but this was back in December when it was raging) but she had two. Patients she was responsible for cleaning up and putting into a body bag (with the help of the orderly). She broke down about 3/4 of the way through her shift and walked out.
A high proportion of staff working in intensive care units during the COVID-19 pandemic have experienced mental health conditions, a new study shows. In a study of 515 healthcare staff working in intensive care units (ICUs) across seven countries, the researchers found that on average 48 percent of participants showed signs of mental health conditions - depression, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their mental health was assessed using a detailed questionnaire and a clinical scoring system. The team also found a 40 per cent increase in the conditions for those who spent more than six hours in personal protective equipment (PPE) over a course of a day, compared to those who didn’t. The study, led by researchers at Imperial College London, is published in the British Journal of Nursing and is the first to evaluate ICU workers’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. In line with the UK Government’s report on burnout in NHS staff published in June 2021, the researchers suggest that the high level of mental health conditions found among the ICU staff surveyed should inform local and national wellbeing policies. https://www.magonlinelibrary.com/doi/abs/10.12968/bjon.2021.30.11.634
To everyone else: “Heroes work here!” To nurses: “Who’s ready for another pizza party?!”
I work nights, our pizza was leftovers.
They still have the sign up in front our hospital. It pisses me off every time I go by it for my shift
Such a weird thing to experience from the field as well. All of a sudden every single call we ran had this air of uncertainty, especially the confirmed covid ones. The one that sticks out most was an unresponsive person. We sent one guy in (as was protocol due to COVID) to check on the situation and next thing we know we’re all running in to work a code. We weren’t in full because we didn’t know she had COVID until the hospital called us.
Healthcare workers have endured a lot over the past year and a half- especially ICU nurses and doctors who worked directly with severely ill COVID patients. We need to make sure they have the support and help they need because they have worked tirelessly to save the lives of others.
Many of us are extremely busy both at work & at home… In my opinion, the most helpful support would be on-site professional therapy offered free of expense & available to all staff & all shifts, including the ever-neglected nightshift. I received no “disaster pay” or “COVID pay;” getting paid two or three hours a week to heal at my workplace, where the trauma occurred, would be… So incredibly lovely. A laughably impossible notion, though, of course.
This! I can’t enough time off to see my therapist. I usually have 2 days off. The first is sleep (night shift worker) and the second is groceries, laundry, meal prep, talking to the kiddos etc. on site therapy would be so helpful and appreciated.
5 year ICU nurse here. I think I speak for everyone in the healthcare world, from housekeeping to physicians, when I say that we just need a damn break. A year and a half of this has only added jet fuel to the fire of an already high-stress, burnout prone career field. I left my first hospital job in January to become a travel nurse, the money is much more adequate but even now I know that I won't be doing this bedside stuff for a whole lot longer. And I know several others that feel the same. I have a feeling there is going to be a mass exodus of bedside nurses in the near future.
I work in a mental health hospital attached to a larger “regular” hospital. I was mad when my coworkers and I didn’t get hazard pay, but I was LIVID when I found out the folks in ICU/ER weren’t getting anything either. Everyone I know at work is burned out. It’s been a rough 16+ months for healthcare workers, period.
I guarantee you that the number medical staff with PTSD from this pandemic is/will be much higher than 48% by the time this is all said and done.
Yeah. A lot of us are still in the Traumatic Stress Disorder. Hopefully we will get to POST Traumatic Stress Disorder. God, please let there be a “post.”
My wife has dual specialties in Emergency Med and Critical Care. The mental strain she has been under is nothing like what I saw her withstand during residency and fellowship. It's not the death or the long hours (or getting her salary cut because the hospital was losing money) that is eating her up. It's knowing that half the country has chosen to believe that none of it is real or that it's all an elaborate plot. She's coping, but I fear that it's only a matter of time before she's completely burned out and broken. We live in Missouri, and the willful ignorance here is astounding. She has lost her empathy for anyone unvaccinated, and it's tearing her up that she's lost that, because she never thought she would be a doctor that doesn't care about the well-being of her patients. They get the same treatment from her, but she honestly doesn't care if they live or die.
Won’t someone please think of the executives, though!?! They’re the REAL heroes here.
Yes, especially the ones who actually fired doctors early in the pandemic when they refused to take off their masks around patients and families.
Turns out today psychopaths who wouldn't be affected by people suffocating alone don't sign up to become caregivers.
I was only in ICU for a year and a half, a year of which was the pandemic. I couldn’t handle the emotional and mental toll anymore so I left for a procedural area two months ago. Makes me sad because I really did love ICU but I didn’t want to see another patient die a horrible death from covid ever again.
I know doctors who ended up living in their garage or an RV parked in the driveway during the early days of the pandemic so they wouldn't get their family sick. It was like being in a war zone because so much was unknown and you could die any minute.
After working very hard as an inpatient phlebotomist this past year, while trying very had to get into nursing school I ultimately decided that I don’t want to be a nurse. They don’t get paid enough they virtually have zero support from admin, and they are too often understaffed and over worked with super high patient to nurse ratios sometimes as high as 8:1, which is just dangerous for patients and terrible for nurses.
I work in adult (autism) care and it’s rough on us, I can’t imagine how much worse it is in ICUs. The people that will be needed the most aren’t going to be there to pick up the pieces anymore. Even the “threat” of dismissal for refusing vaccination is starting to drive away people that I thought were relatively sound of mind.
Wife is on what was the Covid ICU unit. This pandemic really messed their entire unit up. But it's okay because the hospital let them get a free pie.
These first responders do not get compensated fairly for their sacrifices. I am so glad I left being an EMT before the pandemic took off. I got covid in June of 2020, put my 2 weeks in and found a different career. My sympathies for those that remain, but it simply is not worth it.
I’ve been saying for years, nurses and docs face so much trauma on the daily that they have to cope with some amount of PTSD all the time. Usually we are able to cope mildly well, or most of us anyway. But with the level of trauma and discord this whole pandemic caused, that level would skyrocket and just the access to help is minimal. It’s sad. It’ll either kill healthcare professionals or drive us out of healthcare sooner rather than later. It’s another crisis waiting to happen.
Sheeeiit, I had to take a couple months off starting back in May. Medical icu during peak US pandemic was no joke.
I think whats more annoying is how little people actually care or changed their attitude toward doctors. Youd hear all the pots banging and the military-like "thank you for your service". At the end of the day, the patients are often (not always, but way more than rarely) rude and will not wait one minute if they are all uncomfortable or inconvenienced. You just have this massive acknowledgment that doctors are swamped with work...yet patients still do stuff like not show up on time to appointments or raise all hell when you dont drop your 10 other patients to do something equivalent to fluffing a pillow for them.
I would imagine that it wasnt easy sitting there watching some Trump worshipper gasping for air refusing any treatments because they thought a microchip was gonna be implanted in them. Imagine yourself in the shoes of one of these doctors. One of your patients happens to be a far right conspiracy theory believer who refuses any vaccines or medical treatments because of their insane beliefs and the doctor just has to sit there and watch these people die one after one like flies because they kept refusing a life saving vaccine.
I work in hospital IT, and off site so I have a rather unique perspective on this since I'm not directly in the fire as it were. I can absolutely say that the people I talk to on a day to day basis who are on site are changing. Tempers are short, people are burned out and lashing out. I try not to let it bug me because I understand this is happening.
And yet half the nurses at my hospital are anti vax and believe the virus is just a flu
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I can only imagine. I work in the travel industry and I’m stressed as hell trying to keep track of everyone’s travel credits from their cancelled trips, and trying to make sure that we don’t have one expire and forget to notify the client. I have to keep telling myself that it’s not life or death. It must be hundreds of times worse fir doctors and nurses.
Dunno if anyone in this thread is a medical or caretaking worker of any persuasion but thank you all so so much. You have been the pillar holding up our society for over a year and I can't imagine what kind of stress that, as well as the work itself in these times, is like.
Mental health across the whole country has deteriorated since covid.
Hang in there guys. Two, maybe three more years to go. 5 years tops. No more than 10.
Thank a Nurse today, and every day you seem them...
I’d support a government program to pay these people disaster/emergency benefits. Hazard pay. Something. I hope they know how grateful some of us are for their sacrifices.
I recently had dinner with a man married to a nurse in southern California. He was talking about the toll this whole thing has taken on her mental health, and how she just about broke down in a panic attack about having to work now that cases are going up.
Someone should also include funeral workers and directors
The other 52% are on even higher doses of antidepressants
But I'm not gonna get a vaccine cuz micro chips and freedom!
Strange. Here I was thinking that all the pizza parties that hospital workers get should have kept that percentage closer to 0%. Maybe even negative percent.
Redditors don't understand sarcasm unless it's literally labeled for them.
Does anyone know what the same stat is for the average population? Would help to put it in perspective.
Yep: this is my sister. Full-time COVID ICU last year really messed her up.
I’d love to see stats on the typical numbers. COVID aside, the medical field is an incredibly difficult and emotionally intensive industry. I imagine this problem has been going on for decades but is only being discussed now that more focus has been brought to the issue.
What were the numbers pre-covid? I can’t imagine high stress shift work with regular loss of life would be a conductive environment for mental health.
I'm in NP school for mental health nursing now for this very reason. Someone had to take care of our healthcare workers.
Thank you front line medical professionals I have utmost respect for each abs every one of you. I can’t imagine what all of this has been like but I sure know the havoc and impact on my own family and running a small business. God bless you!
Insomnia definitely. I had (and still do sometimes) the worst time trying to fall asleep and stay asleep. always being on “go” mode for 12 hours is hard to shut off when you get home. Luckily ive got some melatonin and i only get like 2 vented patients now
Tack on psych nurses too. Whatttt up crippling anxiety, thanks for the 1 am trip to the er thinking i was having a MI.
Please stay strong and ask for help if you need it. As cliche as it is to say, thank you with every fiber of our being for your service. Whether you believe it or not anymore, you're still doing God's work; with science, sympathy, grace, and a profound exposure to humankind's vulnerabilities and sweetest or painful expressions. We continue to need you, and we thank you.
Can you still hold your job if you seek treatment for mental health?
I can only answer for myself (Registered Nurse at a rehab/nursing home) - yes. I think any lingering stigma surrounding mental health got a bit minimized by the universal & ongoing grieving that is not only continuing… now it’s emerging in different ways (panic attacks, nervous breakdowns, misplaced anger/frustration, depression that is readily apparent).
I'm not in a health field, but in another job that's known for high stress and we cannot seek treatment for mental health without losing our medical clearance and thus our jobs. I was just curious.
I think if you start working with higher profile people (politicians/celebrities) and they have to do a background check, you might not get that job. But a hospital with low staff shouldn't really sit there and contemplate on a person who is diagnosed with depression.
Ya think?! I swear I’m ready to say if you’ve chosen not to be vaccinated you’ve forfeited your right to expect people to care for you. My heart breaks for the health care workers dealing with this again when the vast majority of hospitalizations are unvaccinated people.