COVID 19

As I shared in my last post, I was working as a nurse during the COVID-19 pandemic– at the very dawn of it. Looking back, many I know are very blase about what it really was and what happened. It doesn’t help that each political side dug into their version, and it seems transparency and truth telling have succumbed to political power.

I cannot tell you how brave every front-line healthcare worker was to show up to work every day dealing with the unknown. From first responders (firefighters, police, and EMS), to CNA’s, to nurses, to respiratory therapists, and to doctors. Many health professionals assisted in any way they could– perhaps operating outside of their normal comfort zone just to save lives. Everyone who was working was putting their lives at risk. We didn’t know clearly how COVID-19 spread, what were the best therapies to treat, and what patients were more at risk. We were operating in darkness.

At the beginning of the pandemic, it looked very dire for those that went into the hospital. In those early days, if you ended up on a ventilator, you had a very high risk of mortality. Estimates vary wildly but let’s say a median good guess was around 75%. That’s not great.

My mother-in-law, who just turned 94 this year, visits us twice per year between her Minnesota and Arizona stays (yes, she’s a snowbird). In 2020, I told my husband I didn’t believe it was wise to have her come and stay with us as I didn’t want to be the one responsible for giving her an illness that no one knew who would live or die. She bypassed us and went to stay with her son and daughter-in-law that live in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking she was safe. None of them work in healthcare.

What happens? They all get COVID. My then 90 y/o mother-in-law, her son, my sister-in-law, and my niece. Age ranges from 20 to 90. Who gets sickest and needs to be hospitalized? My brother-in-law ended up needing to be on the ventilator. Knowing the early statistics as I did, I told my husband to brace himself. That this may not turn out very well. He thought I was being my normal, crazy, psychotic, healthcare worker that over-exaggerates everything (which, of course, I’m not. He just doesn’t have the inbred worry of every healthcare provider out there).

The good news is that my brother-in-law, after being intubated for three days, was extubated and is 90% recovered from the illness. To this day, he still has some lingering effects. My sister-in-law and niece got ill but didn’t require hospitalization. The least affected? My mother-in-law who got some slight sniffles.

A couple of years after, my husband was doing some reading on the pandemic and came to me and said, “I see why you were so worried about my brother. You were right– lots of people died in those early days who were put on the vent.”

It’s easy to look back in hindsight and think that what all of us who were heavily involved in the pandemic lived through turned out to be no big deal, but it was a VERY big deal.

Lots of death. We honestly didn’t know if we would be next. Think about this and please don’t ever tell a healthcare worker who lived through those early days that what they experienced what “no big deal”.

If you’re a healthcare worker, I’m curious as to what your experience was in those early days of COVID-19. I’d love for you to share your thoughts looking back. What do you want people to know?

On March 6th, 2020, my novel Fugitive Spy was released. The inspiration for the novel was a nonfiction title called Biohazard by Ken Alibek which I read around 2016. That book was published in 2000.

The author of Biohazard was intimately involved in the bioweapons program for the Russian Federation (formerly the Soviet Union) in the late 1980’s. His job was to increase the virulence of bioweapons through lab manipulation. He concluded at the end of his book that despite international law– he felt confident these expiraments were ongoing in different parts of the world.

Gain of function research. Sound familiar?

Pandemics are part of our human history and will continue to be. When I first entered nursing in 1993, HIV had been on the scene for about a decade. This virus has killed approximately 40+ million people. COVID-19 and its subvariants, depending on the source you consider and the reliability of the data, is currently around 7 million.

When the pandemic broke in March of 2020, I was working as a Nursing House Supervisor at a mid size children’s hospital. When did I know COVID would be different than other pandemics? After all, I had trained to deal with the Ebola outbreak that occurred from 2014-2016 and there were only a handful of US cases. Lots of prep– no excitement. This is generally what we like in healthcare.

To be honest, my first inkling that something was going to be different was when my daughters’ marching band trip to Disneyland was cancelled days before they were set to fly out. In quick fashion, things began to shut down. Grocery stores were emptying out. I was hoping this was going to be short lived. A few months and we’d be in the clear as I’d experienced with worse than normal flu or RSV seasons. A physician friend of mine said buckle up– this is going to last 2-3 years. She was right.

When the adult hospital on our campus erected a tent in their parking lot for overflow cases–mmmm– I had not seen anything like that before. We changed how we used PPE. We changed what rooms certain patients could go in based on room flow and filtration. We stopped offering some services. OR and PACU nurses were running screening desks. Visiting guidelines changed weekly– if not daily.

I honestly can’t imagine what my adult nursing colleagues were going through. Our cases in the early days did not come close to what they were dealing with. The bravery of every healthcare provider from first responders to specialists astounds me to this day. It’s easy now to look back and think– what were they so worried about?

We were operating in darkness. Physicians were using past experience to treat a novel virus. The toolbelt of medications was sparse. Think about that . . . . standing at a bedside with a patient in front of you sick with something you don’t know how to treat . . . you don’t know how it’s really being spread . . . but you see people dying and are wondering if you are next to get ill or die simply because you showed up and were steadfastly honoring the commitment you made to take care of sick people . . . of perfect strangers.

The WHO estimates a median average of 115,000 healthcare workers lost their lives. The range is 80,000 to 180,000 worldwide. Healthcare workers that have died from HIV as the result of an on the job exposure is far, far less.

In those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would come home from work, throw my scrubs directly in the wash, and shower before I was close to anyone in my family.

That’s what the early days were like . . .