'It's So Much Worse This Time,' Exhausted ICU Nurse Says Of Current COVID-19 Surge
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"Nothing we do makes a difference. The world spins on, oblivious and belligerent, as we fight to save the tidal wave coming our way," Nashville nurse Kat...
Working frantically to help COVID patients in 2020 was hellish, declared a registered nurse in Nashville who started just last year. But it’s nothing compared to now.
“For months, as a nurse intern” last year, “I’d watched the battle-weary nurses emerge from COVID rooms, taking off their PPE like warriors stripping off armor, their faces lined from the pressure of the respirators. There was something etched in their faces ... some terrible weight that came from caring for these patients,” Kathryn Ivey wrote in an essay in Scientific American Thursday. “I learned how to be a nurse with death constantly at my heels.”
The ICU was “bleak, and everything we did felt futile, and I realized at some point I felt more like a ferryman to death than anything else,” Ivey noted. It “felt like purgatory, like a punishment, like we were torturing these people whose bodies were wrecked beyond hope.”