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shadowkatPlease share this video and story and make it go viral. Please. Maybe we can save lives.
As the pandemic rages across the United States, breaking records nearly every day for deaths and cases, some nurses and doctors are reaching a breaking point.
Some have battled surges in their areas for months. Others have been more recently overwhelmed. Many are physically and emotionally drained and suffer from a crushing sense of inadequacy and anxiety. Experts say health care workers are ever more susceptible to post-traumatic stress. Some are closing their practices or leaving their jobs because of the toll on themselves, their families, their patients and their colleagues.
Particularly anguishing, some health care workers say, is the cavalier attitude many Americans display toward the virus.
“There is such a disconnect between the hospital and the surrounding communities,” one doctor wrote in an exchange later posted on Twitter. “I don’t drive home to bells, whistles and clanging pots and pans … I drive home stunned through a college town with lines out the doors for the local bars.”
In an attempt to break through that disconnect, about 100 of the nation’s largest and best hospital groups released an ad campaign today, in print and video, that is a call to arms — or rather, a call to mask up.
“We put our lives on the line daily to keep you safe. So, do something for us. Wear. A. Mask,” a caption in the video reads.
I reached out to Ashley Bartholomew, a registered nurse who recently resigned from her job in a Covid ward at an El Paso hospital, but stayed on for another two weeks because of the desperate need. She said identifying a single breaking point was difficult, but told me about an exchange with a patient who was improving.
She went into his room in full P.P.E. as he was watching the national news cover El Paso’s need for more mobile morgues.
“He said the news is making it a bigger deal than it really is,” she recalled. She tried to remain professional, but couldn’t hold back her tears. “I said: ‘You know, I’ll be brutally honest. This is my last shift and I’ve never seen so much death, so much sickness, in the last two weeks than I have my entire 10 years of being in health care.’”
Taken aback, the patient said he thought everyone in the ward was doing as well as he was. Of the 25 rooms she had been in that day, she told him, he was the only patient able to chat. Everyone else was too sick.
“This is a pandemic within a pandemic,” she said. “A pandemic of misinformation along with the Covid-19 pandemic. And health care workers, we can’t fight both at the same time.”
American Health Care Workers Issue A Call To Arms For Wearing Masks
As the pandemic rages across the United States, breaking records nearly every day for deaths and cases, some nurses and doctors are reaching a breaking point.
Some have battled surges in their areas for months. Others have been more recently overwhelmed. Many are physically and emotionally drained and suffer from a crushing sense of inadequacy and anxiety. Experts say health care workers are ever more susceptible to post-traumatic stress. Some are closing their practices or leaving their jobs because of the toll on themselves, their families, their patients and their colleagues.
Particularly anguishing, some health care workers say, is the cavalier attitude many Americans display toward the virus.
“There is such a disconnect between the hospital and the surrounding communities,” one doctor wrote in an exchange later posted on Twitter. “I don’t drive home to bells, whistles and clanging pots and pans … I drive home stunned through a college town with lines out the doors for the local bars.”
In an attempt to break through that disconnect, about 100 of the nation’s largest and best hospital groups released an ad campaign today, in print and video, that is a call to arms — or rather, a call to mask up.
“We put our lives on the line daily to keep you safe. So, do something for us. Wear. A. Mask,” a caption in the video reads.
I reached out to Ashley Bartholomew, a registered nurse who recently resigned from her job in a Covid ward at an El Paso hospital, but stayed on for another two weeks because of the desperate need. She said identifying a single breaking point was difficult, but told me about an exchange with a patient who was improving.
She went into his room in full P.P.E. as he was watching the national news cover El Paso’s need for more mobile morgues.
“He said the news is making it a bigger deal than it really is,” she recalled. She tried to remain professional, but couldn’t hold back her tears. “I said: ‘You know, I’ll be brutally honest. This is my last shift and I’ve never seen so much death, so much sickness, in the last two weeks than I have my entire 10 years of being in health care.’”
Taken aback, the patient said he thought everyone in the ward was doing as well as he was. Of the 25 rooms she had been in that day, she told him, he was the only patient able to chat. Everyone else was too sick.
“This is a pandemic within a pandemic,” she said. “A pandemic of misinformation along with the Covid-19 pandemic. And health care workers, we can’t fight both at the same time.”
American Health Care Workers Issue A Call To Arms For Wearing Masks