Oh hi everyone! Long time no see, but I’m sure you all will understand my absence. We are currently battling a pandemic and as you may or may not know I’m currently on the frontlines and smack-dab in the middle facing this pandemic.

I figured that talking about my experience being a nurse working with Covid patients is a great way to ease myself back into blogging. It makes me feel like I don’t have to explain too much why I have stopped so abruptly after finally feeling like gaining some momentum.

How crazy the past few months have been!

So what is it like? To those of you that do not work or know anyone that work in healthcare, I’m sure it sounds scary and completely crazy. Well you would be right. As fluid as this whole situation is, we have had to completely adapt to the million changes that happened so frequently.

It is exhausting.

When the cases were surging, our hospital had to turn more and more units into Covid units as the ones we already had started to fill up.

The uncertainty of the situation that you could face everyday in my line of work is already stressful but to add possible exposure to a novel and highly contagious virus on top of that? Well, it’s enough to get anyone’s anxiety level to shoot up.

Before our shift starts.

We go in our unit with our n95s and are given scrubs to change into. Since our unit has yet to be fully converted and our rooms still waiting to be turned into negative pressure rooms, we have to have n95s on AT ALL TIMES. Now these masks are not meant to be worn that long. If you have had any experience wearing these masks you would know how uncomfortable they are after a few hours, let alone 12-13 hours. We then have to don a head covering, goggles/faceshields, and shoe covers.

No nurse is allowed to leave the unit. If we come into contact with infected patients, we are considered dirty. So our unit has designated “clean runners.” They are the ones allowed out of the unit to run for necessities such as running labs or picking up medications from the tube system. So if you are one of the nurses that like to take a breather and take lunch outside in the sun or to just get some fresh air, we had to say goodbye to that.

Tripled, quadrupled our work.

Since the pandemic began, one of the biggest issues the healthcare field faced was the PPE shortage. We still have to be mindful and be conservative with our PPE usage so every visit in a patient room, you have to make sure you’re doing everything that need to be done. If you forget something, you have to call for it to be delivered to you. This means that morning rounds take longer. With the our aids not having to be in the same room, we do vitals, blood sugar checks, assess, clean/change, give meds, feed patients and every other thing that pt needs at the time.

Oh and we do not have phlebotomists drawing our labs so all blood draws have to be done by us. Transport? That is also gone. I had to take a patient down for stat CT scan, and you should have seen my face when I was told I have to push the bed by myself. But with the encouragement from my manager who was my clean person during transport (the clean person opens the doors while I am the only one allowed to touch the patient and the bed when we transport patients for tests), I pushed, albeit struggled, that bed all the way and back, panting into my mask and also very thankful that I didn’t run into any walls.

Each visit to a patient room requires us to obviously don our PPEs and remove them appropriately each time. One time we ran out of gowns and had to bunny suit, and these are not the easiest to get in and out of. Also imagine doing patient care in these things? I came out of a patient’s room and was covered in sweat.

Some shifts are so busy that the thought of getting something to drink becomes a reasoning battle with yourself. “I’m so thirsty but I need to get this done real quick and then I’ll get something to drink.” Forty-five minutes later, new orders show up from the doctors and patients are yelling for you to come see them and family members are calling for updates, and lab needs you to draw another sample, wait, blood sugars needs to be done because lunch trays are almost here and the tech is with another patient, oh and these medications are due now. Now imagine a discharge or admission on top of that. Please don’t, if you’re a nurse, it will make you want to cry.

Some hours later, you realized you need to get some charting done but you also have to take your mandatory break because you know, legal stuff. So you just save that drink of water you’ve wanted to take 3 hours ago, until you go to lunch. Same story kind of goes with wanting to use the bathroom, unless it’s emergent and you have to force yourself to go.

The patients.

The patients range from “I had trouble breathing but feel better now, I can go home” to “I can’t breathe, and this amount of oxygen is no longer helping me, give me 100% now!” Some patients are on trial for hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, and convalescent plasma. They are encouraged to lay prone or face down to improve breathing. No matter what, these patients condition can change very quickly. We were trained how to respond to a code in a covid unit and it’s a situation we never ever want to find ourselves in.

We recently switched over to respirators to give our face a break from the n95s. As you can see they are very rough on the face. The respirators are slightly more comfortable but it still leaves you sore and have redness around your face.

At the end of shift, we have to change back into our own scrubs, clean our respirators and come home to only have time to wash up and eat.

The exhaustion is something I don’t even know how to explain. Not just physically but mentally and emotionally. I love having time to myself when I’m home to just recover and recharge. If you have someone that work in healthcare, be kind to them. We might look okay, but I promise you we are tired, in all sense of the word.

Like most of you, I can’t wait for things to go back to normal. Thank you for reading and getting a glimpse of what it’s like being a nurse during this pandemic.

STAY SAFE AND HEALTHY ALWAYS!

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Julie
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Tampa blogger that loves to try new things! Loves to write about experiences that make her happy hoping to inspire others to find their own bliss.

#Floridablogger