I’ve shared a few of my thoughts on all that is going on right now over on Instagram… but I felt the urge to capture this moment in time more formally on the blog. So here goes: my take on all things COVID-19, from the perspective of a nurse and mama.
Obviously, this is a worldwide pandemic that has affected everyone’s lives in different ways, and I feel blessed to be healthy, and have a job… so I just want to start with that….
As a nurse, this has been lifechanging. First of all, we started screening for recent travel to China in FEBRUARY, so to find out a month later that not only our hospitals, but our entire nation was drastically underprepared with PPE was absolutely shocking to me. There are very highly paid epidemiologists, within both our government as well as the private institutions we all work for, who should have seen this coming, IMO. It took me WEEKS to even wrap my head around the fact that first “people”, and then myself, were being told to place masks into a paper bag and then back on our face for the next use. It still makes me physically nauseous that we are being forced to follow policies that not only put us in danger, but we literally would have been written up for doing a few months ago. NEVER has it been okay to reuse any kind of PPE or to wear the same PPE for multiple patients. But to think about putting a mask that is potentially contaminated with a deadly virus that we know NOTHING about into a bag where it can ruminate with all of its germs…. and then returning it to my face to breath into repeatedly, is absolutely terrifying. Forget about the fact that even the CDC can’t decide how it is being spread, and that we are only being “allowed” to wear certain equipment for certain procedures. Nevermind that coughing can aerosolize respiratory viruses and patients don’t usually tell you when they are going to do that with enough notice to don any sort of PPE… but I digress……
We had a period of time where we were waiting for the storm to hit… things were almost eerily quiet with all elective surgery cancelled and no visitors in the hospitals. They still kind of are in terms of “normal” patients – where are all the strokes and heart attacks?? The belly pains? It seems like people are following advice and staying away from the hospital unless it is a true emergency (which makes you thinkkkkkk in general lol)… or they are just terrified to get COVID so they are staying away. BUT what hospitals ARE full of, is COVID patients… and the percentage of them requiring critical care is high. These people are SICK. And they’re ALONE, which is the saddest part.
Which brings me to the other aspect beyond PPE…. being called on to work outside of your specialty, training, knowledge base, and quite frankly comfort zone. I have never been an ICU nurse, and while I am comfortable managing critical care patient’s within my area, ED and PACU are both more of a short term management of these types of patients… stabilizing them and getting them to their destination. If I were to transfer to an ICU with my current experience I would still get months of training… so to be expected to be able to do it with none, is terrifying, and appalling. Obviously hospitals doing this in different ways, but it is causing so much anxiety for many.
Driving into work… I have a feeling of terror that I am actually quite familiar with. It is very similar to the feeling I had after having Taylor and returning to work with PTSD and panic attacks. But honestly… when I’m in the moment and I’m taking care of potential COVID patients, I’m not all that scared. When I put on my nurse face… I guess that’s what it is… I get to work and I go into nurse mode. We all suit up and do our job and while we are in the moment we aren’t thinking about ourselves… we are thinking about our patients and doing what we do. But when the PPE comes off… when we leave work and we go home… we are struck with an unfamiliar type of terror. Change, clothes in a paper bag, wash, lysol, shoes in a box the garage, shower, scrub. Was I exposed today? Is it on me? Am I bringing it home to those I love? People are stripping in the parking garage… and even more drastically, isolating themselves from their families so that they don’t infect them…
But what about when you don’t have that option? What about us nurses who are also the wives of other essential personnel? AND mothers? Which one of us will be exposed? What happens when we are both exposed? Who will take care of our kids? How will we isolate? Does one of us go somewhere? But for how long… they are saying this could go on well through the summer… and it’s never really going away. And as a mother of young children, I can’t imagine isolating myself within the house… they find me everywhere lol lets be real. So does one of us quit?? So that only one is going out and being exposed??
Obviously that isn’t an option for most people either. In a weird way, our move being scheduled for this time, even though it stinks that it is delayed, worked out that I had scheduled myself for less hours at work, thinking we would already be renovating. So in our case, Russ has mostly been the one working and being exposed… showering and changing before he leaves work and lysolling his boots in the garage. But… if this goes on and on… I’m not sure what we will do.
The other thing I want to capture about this time in our lives is the time home with our families. It has been incredibly challenging, wearing all the hats. Teaching and managing kids of multiple ages while they navigate through school and a new normal has been a struggle, especially since we are not in our own space right now until we move. I feel overwhelmed and pulled in a million directions, with no time for myself, and feeling kind of trapped with no where else to go. But also, this time at home has changed my perspective and made me repriotirize, which I don’t think is a bad thing. I often think about how this pandemic will change our lives for the future… what will last. And I hope that the priorities I have started to make while we are all home… like more family time, physical fitness, self care, and appreciating the little things… will be the ones that stick.
I wonder how this is affecting the kids. They have so many questions about wearing masks, and Taylor is quite frankly afraid of them. I hope they aren’t feeding off of my anxiety and fear. I wonder if this will shift our lives to one where homeschooling, and potentially households where only one family member works outside the home… will be our new normal. I’m a homebody through and through so I honestly wouldn’t mind it (once we actually get into our new house lol)… I also wouldn’t mind a decrease in the crippling anxiety I feel surrounding work, though… and I do miss getting OUT. I also hope this is helping us live more intentionally and lest wastefully, because I know that this has changed the way we live, shop, and function daily.
For now… I’m just trying to slow things down and focus on the little things. I’m trying to avoid the news… especially the inflammatory stories being shared across social media. While I do wonder about some of the conspiracy theories… they are not helpful to my anxiety, and I can’t change or worry about what is out of my control. At the end of each day, no matter how many times I feel overwhelmed… there are always tiny positives, and if I recall them every night after I get the kids to bed, I find it leaves me with a different perspective of the day… feeling nostalgic rather than overwhelmed about this time in our lives… and that’s how I’d really like to remember it.
