B.H. Registered Nurse

I’m terrified to bring Covid home to my elderly parents I live with. I ended up with Covid myself and infected my whole family. Tremendous guilt ensued, and I’m still terrified to come home.

I feel like a leper, and that most people want to stay as far away from me as possible when they find out that I work on the Covid ICU.

I stopped eating and an eating disorder from my past reared its ugly head again, making me very ill. I felt like choosing not to eat amidst the chaos was literally the only thing that I could control.

My Covid ICU is at capacity now, with SO many patients getting ventilated in the last week alone. Most aren’t going to make it. They just aren’t.

It’s heartbreaking watching family members sit outside their loved one’s room, granted special “visiting” privileges because their loved one is at end of life, and they can’t even go into the patient’s room to hold their hand.

You take every death personally and you feel like it’s a failure of your passion and profession.

I broke down the other day with a patient’s wife as she watched her husband breathing nearly 50 times per minute (he did not want to be intubated and he chose to be a Do Not Resuscitate status). Just watching him and waiting for him to get so tired from breathing so fast that his body just gives out.

Their autistic 9 year old son couldn’t understand.

Medical professionals are supposed to be “professional,” but I’m human and I could not help but feel her pain and hold HER hand instead of her husband’s because she is the one who will suffer more, once he died. I could’ve gone into her husband’s room and held HIS hand, but I felt like that would be so unfair to his WIFE: I could hold his hand, dressed in full PPE, but she couldn’t.

You take every death personally and you feel like it’s a failure of your passion and profession. WHY do this if you “let” these people die?! I don’t feel like a hero at all! It hasn’t gotten easier. I can’t turn on my professional face and turn off my emotions. I just can’t. I don’t know how much more any of us can take…