Edit: Here's the source.
This comment on the post sums up my feelings well:
Perhaps someday, there will be a retroactive sorrow for how doctors and healthcare workers were intentionally driven to quit their jobs during the pandemic by ignorant fools and intentional maniacs.
Perhaps.
TL;DR : Covid deniers made me quit intensive care, and maybe nursing all together.
This may be poorly written, as it's what my dyslexic, ADHD riddled brain is allowing me to remember. I haven't written this down before, and some I haven't ever spoken of before.
I was a freshly qualified nurse, graduated in September 2019, ready to start the career I had worked tirelessly to get. Whilst my training was in adults, and mainly rural, community based, I knew what I wanted. I was going straight into a Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (ICU), in the centre of London, dealing with the sickest children in the UK.
By the time accommodation and background checks were sorted, I started working in January 2020. The learning curve was steep. I was now in charge of the breathing and heart rate of these tiny humans, using complex equations to ensure safe sedation, and frankly, getting used to living and commuting in one of the busiest cities in the world.
By March, I was deemed competent to take the "easiest" patients, using that in the loosest term possible, as you don't go in ICU for a case of the sniffles. Technically, I was being supervised from a distance, but looking up from my monitoring equipment, I could see every senior nurse, bar the nurse-in-charge that day, was cramming into the staff room. Important managerial talks were happening, but nothing was being shared with the staff "on the shop floor".
We were aware of this novel disease you'd hear on the news, and we were briefed very quickly on how to get someone into PPE for our singular isolation room, in the rare chance we take someone with this " Coronavirus ", but only senior specialist staff would be going in there, as help wouldn't be readily available in an emergency, but we'd be alternating who was in there every hour or so, as you can't wear PPE for that long.
That evening, as the managers kept talking, I handed my patient over to the night team. I talked to my patients' family about how lovely my colleague is, and they'll be in the best hands possible, joking "other than mine of course, but I'll be sleeping". We laughed, and I said I'm back in the morning to take over again, so I'll see them shortly.
I didn't know how wrong I was.
I arrived the next morning to find out all paediatric patients had been shipped out to other hospitals in the night. In order to help the Adult ICU upstairs with the sheer number of Corona-infected patients, we would be taking all of their " clean " patients.
At this point, testing for the disease wasn't possible, so we were taking anyone whose admission wasn't respiratory related, which mainly meant trauma patients.
I was sent to the same bed space, but what awaited me was not the same patient. My tiny toddler was now a man taller than my 6'2" frame, and at least triple my weight (which I only cared about from a physically-turning perspective, not for the racist and inaccurate BMI). Immediately, I spotted sw*stikas and Engl*sh Def*nce Le*gue tattoos.
My patient was a neo-n*zi.
My Jewish, queer, disabled self had to treat this man. I raised my concerns, but as he was technically the least complex patient, I had to take him, as I was the newest and least qualified member of the team.
The junior doctor assigned to my area hadn't turned up, so the remaining members of the medical team were even more stretched than usual. I now know it was she had been assaulted on her way in for being East Asian. The sinophobic rhetoric about the disease was all that was needed for the worst of us to attack harmless individuals. This carried on throughout the first wave with our Southeast Asian and East Asian colleges needing to travel in groups for safety.
"Clean" Only lasted about a week. Side Rooms were utilised at first. We had a fully positive unit a week later.
The novelty and comradery of the first month or so was slowly eroded away by the horrendous death toll. Some patients you almost wished weren't holding on for so long, drawing out a painful but inevitable death. We couldn't afford time to mourn patients, as that bed space was already needed for another dying individual. Our morgue was full, so we ended up using refrigerated lorries, usually used for transporting fish fingers, just to store the bodies.
Darker sides to people came out. Phrases like "would they even want to live as a cr*pple", "manufactured Chinese bioweapon" and "genetic superiority of [non-BAME] individuals to fight the disease" were found in the staff room. I didn't want to work here anymore.
I saw more death in months than most see in a life time. Even nurses who've worked years said there wasn't death of this magnitude during their time working in the AIDS units (which some other staff wouldn't acknowledge as a pandemic).
On a night shift, a patient of mine passed in the early hours of the morning. As I prepped them to go to the "temporary overflow morgue", the bottling up of my emotions, which had got me through this far, finally overflowed.
I wept.
I couldn't stop weeping for a person I barely knew. I wish I could say I remember every patient who died in my care, but I would be lying. I remember very little of my time there. I think it's my subconscious trying to protect me from the trauma.
After helping my colleagues prepare their 6 o'clock meds, they decided I should go home early. Whether it was for my wellbeing, or just so they could have some peace and quiet, I do not know.
Walking to the bus-stop at 5:30am, I was stopped by 2 police officers. Neither wore a mask as they demanded to know what I was doing walking around. I tried to keep my distance as I asked them to put a mask on. They saw this as aggression. I explained I was coming from a Covid ICU, and needed them to take precautions. Again, they didn't. I was searched in an alleyway. I remained paralysed with fear as I cried. I was mocked for being a wimp by these men, who continued searching me and my bag. Unable to find anything, I was "let off with a warning" and told "not to do this sort of thing again". I couldn't move from that spot for what felt like ages. I blamed myself for everything that happened. I couldn't sleep until I had bleached my hair, both head and arm, and shaved my beard and body. I've been called a k*ke before by a patient, and I thought that must be why I was stopped outside my own hospital, NHS badge in hand, so I tried to cover up my heritage until I felt safe to walk alone outside again.
Eventually, the overwhelming numbers dropped. We weren't replacing the dead. We deep-cleaned the unit, and tried to return to normal. That's when we began to hear about the world outside.
Accusations of us being murderers. The whole thing was a hoax. This had been planned from the start. Children were immune so continue on as normal.
I was defeated. I couldn't believe some people could genuinely believe that. I've heard my share of conspiracy theories in my time, but hearing that people think you're perpetrating one is so invalidating to your own lived experience. Knowing that these people were protesting a lockdown in place for their own safety, not taking any of the measures needed to prevent spreading covid, and elongating my suffering as I tended to the sick, was rage-inducing. I knew these people probably weren't going to require ICU either, they'll just spread it to someone more vulnerable than themselves with their carelessness, because the universe is unjust and cruel like that.
I wanted these people to contract it and suffer a long and excruciating death, without spreading it to others. My compassion had truly run dry.
The arrival of a vaccine was what I pinned my hopes on from the very beginning. I was vaccinated the 1st day my hospital provided it to staff. I was entering the new year of 2021 with my first dose ready to protect me, and I had volunteered to train up and become a peer vaccinator, to increase the speed of the rollout of both the flu and covid jabs, and protect our workforce as soon as possible.
My high hopes and optimism were shattered.
Anti-vaxxers and their vile ideals had wormed their way into the workforce. Never would I have guessed people who worked alongside me genuinely believe that "Autism is caused by jabs". In their twisted mind, they would rather end up dying a horrific death, like everyone we cared for, than be like anything like me. Did they look at me, living my life as an autistic individual, and with their lack of basic science think "I'd rather be dead than be anything like him"?
The love I had for nursing was gone. I had worked tirelessly to get a degree in a profession so specialised, that trying to obtain a Master's in another field is borderline impossible. The desperate need for nurses, and by the masses, means they can't afford to be picky on who they let in. I no longer see myself surrounded by a profession of people wanting to change people's lives. I see it as people doing a stable job.
I've moved into school nursing now. I'm doing a degree to see if I can protect children from abuse, and improve their lives with early Intervention. It doesn't feel like nursing, and maybe that's why I moved across. I'm like a social worker who specialises in health needs, but also improves medical literacy amongst children, their care takers, and their schools. Maybe this is because I've seen what poor understanding of medicine can do to a population. Who knows. I hope this can restore my faith in the profession, because I don't think I'm good enough to do anything else with my life.
