COVID 19 -REAL LIFE
It’s early 2020.
We’re all feeling the buzz of a worldwide pandemic.
Something we’ve never experienced before.
The realization of being a front-line worker is starting to give some anticipation anxiety.
The world is shut down. Our patient load began to trickle.
We dropped our patients per day but in preparation, we had a full staff in the hospital.
This carries on for a few weeks, then the higher-ups start to realize they are losing money.
No patients mean no income to the facility. You know what happens then, don’t you?
YEP.
Budget cuts.
They cut staff. They cut our ER staff. This is right about the time COVID had finally trickled it was to EAST TEXAS.
So, here we are getting our first wave of covid patients and we’re being forced to work short-staffed because of money.
Really. They were making us transfer all covid patients to other facilities because there were no rooms upstairs. We may have a one-on-one vented patient that is covid positive in the ER for 3 days or more. (His nurse will be responsible for at least 3 more patients during her shift. If this specific patient would have been moved to an ICU room, they would have gotten a nurse specifically for them. They would have been her only priority).
People were dying.
Policies were in place to keep people safe, but they were not working. They were making things harder on us. Now, we have angry family members on the phone and 10 X more calls than normal.
HIPAA passwords were the hardest.
“Sorry ma’am, I can’t give you any information about your Mom over the phone. It’s hospital policy.” Meanwhile, the family would usually accompany the patient to the hospital and set up a password before leaving. They were not allowed to come with patients, so what were they supposed to do?
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I’m just following the hospital policy.”
I was forced to separate a wife and husband of 47 years because “sorry sir, we have a strict no visitors policy”.
I watched kids that were still seniors be admitted to the hospital for surgery, alone.
They were the UNLUCKY seniors. They just so happened to be 18, which meant NO VISITOR for you. “SORRY, IT’S FUCKING HOSPITAL POLICY.”
It’s for public safety. “It’s bull shit if you ask me.”
I watched one man give up on life, sign himself out of the hospital on hospice because he refused to be separated from his wife.
I watched families lose their loved ones and not be able to view the body.
No goodbye.
No closure.
“Sorry Ma’am, they’re covid + it’s against hospital policy”.
Meanwhile, nurses are being overworked, with policy changes every hour.
New rules every shift.
Gowns, gloves, masks, shields for each room.
Change in, change out. EVERY TIME.
Well, until the hospital gets low, then you must re-use your PPE the whole shift…
….then, we run out and you use them the whole pay period or indefinitely ….
….. then, you’re required to walk down to the house supervisor’s office and sign out your PPE….
……..you know, to show proof you need it replaced.
People were staying in an ER room for 5 days after the admission, with no inpatient care.
ER nurses are not trained for inpatient care.
Our computer system is even different.
One nurse may have 4 ICU-level patients. If she’s recently pissed her charge nurse off or she has really bad luck.
One nurse may have a trauma or a TPA come in.
This means she becomes 1 to 1 ratio with nurse and patient.
She can’t leave that critical patient, but she has others.
You see, this is where it all gets murky.
People were NOT getting the care they needed.
We couldn’t give it to them.
If that intubated patient were upstairs with his nurse, he would be her only priority.
Here, in the ER, we have 3 other patients. People were going into DKA because we were cluster caring and wouldn’t go in the rooms as often…..to decrease the risk of spread…. it’s that policy thing, again…
This is what happens when you take wives away from their husbands.
Separation mixed with a language barrier and shortness of breath, things get missed in the assessment. The patient is so exhausted that he can barely breathe sufficiently or eat his food, less tell me to check his blood sugar before I feed him.
LISTEN.
Dammit.
This is where people start to die.
This is why.
You can’t take families and split them. It weakens the structure.
Husbands and wives are made ONE- for a reason. Sickness and health.
This is where the WIFE would inform me of the things he couldn’t. (He feels like shit, he has covid.)
This is what family is for. They fight for you when you’re too weak and sick to fight for yourself, right?
“NOPE, sorry that’s against hospital policy.”
Patients couldn’t hold on anymore. They just gave up.
Hospital policy was killing people.
I was done.
I was in a battle…..I was being forced to feel all this compassion for my patients…………..
Because they had no-one else…….
Hey, remember back to last week. When I discussed how hard, fast, and tough….Yeah, well.
I want out.
People are dying and they are fucking dying ALONE.
This is when I started to unravel.
I was miserable at my job.
I hated myself.
I hated what my life had become.
I was miserable in my marriage.
I didn’t feel as if I was even that successful at parenting, either.
I felt stuck.
Like, why am I so miserable?
Why am I the way that I am?
Why do I allow myself to cycle around into self-sabotage over and over again?
We were in the middle of a lockdown, I was living in my travel trailer. Quarantined.
Still in the same yard, but trying to keep my family “safe”.
This is where it all starts.
LIKE really, really.
We’ll call it the AH-HA moment.