International Nurses' Day - a Testimony

So, over the past few weeks lots and lots of people have asked:

How’s it going in there?        What’s it like?

How are you?        Can I pray for you?

How’s it going?

I work in an intensive care unit, which means that I look after very sick adults, who are often so poorly that they have to be asleep with breathing tubes down their throats, hooked up to a ventilator for an indefinite period of time. In a normal climate if you’re that sick there’s about a 20% chance that you won’t recover. However, at the moment, for patients with coronavirus, that percentage is much higher - and that’s the part that’s heartbreaking.

Normally, we have one patient to one nurse, it sounds a lot but when someone is that sick they need to be watched closely, they are entirely dependent on you for absolutely everything, and if you take your eye off them, you could miss something, a subtle change, a big change, and that something might be the thing that kills your patient. At the height of the first peak, I was looking after 3 of these patients  ...  I just turned up to work one morning and my workload had tripled. Other nursing staff have been sent to “help” who don’t really understand ICU and maybe don’t actually want to be there. It can feel quite chaotic. We’re working in operating theatres which have been turned into mini ICUs, and nobody can really see who anyone is under all the PPE, genuinely it feels like some sort of war zone. We’re used to very sick patients and death, we’re used to hard and emotionally draining work. But not on this scale, for this sustained period of time, without us being able to physically stand by the families of our patients and allow them to come to terms with how sick their loved one is and slowly explain that they might not get better. 

How am I?

I love being a nurse, I love the achievement of getting people back to being them. I love the teamwork and camaraderie. I love taking someone who’s knocking on death’s door and when I leave 12 hours later, they’ve make progress and aren’t as sick as they were when I started my shift.  

Covid is different though, it doesn’t play by the rules and some patients are SO YOUNG. Quite frankly, some days it's felt like the most soul destroying, exhausting and frightening thing I’ve ever been a part of.  But the whole country has come behind us, people are raising money, donating food, gifting us hand cream ...  it’s been lovely not having to think about things like making lunch. 

So overall I’m coping, but many of us will come out of this time feeling scarred, myself included. 

What’s it like?

Don’t think anyone’s been posting about how much sweat there is involved in wearing full PPE? We have sore ears, bruised noses, marked cheeks; but the sweat is the worst. It’s weird coming home and feeling like you never want to leave again, especially when we know other people are climbing the walls because they're respecting the lockdown.

Can you pray? 

Yes, please pray!!!

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