Quote by HeraTeleia
All of it. Probably the most difficult was filling out death certificates--I'm an L&D nurse, women don't just up and die on us. Early in the year, as I was filling out one of the first ones, a Reuters pool photographer caught a pic of me. My hair was tied up and I was sort of at an angle to the photographer, but what is stunning is what he captured--there were teardrops on the paper. And I don't cry.
I'm up to 203 certificates now, just me. I don't know why I keep track of the number, I just do. We are all human, but at the end of the day, we're just numbers and letters on paper, lives untold.
Update. 337 death certificates now. Again, all adult women, and that number is only what I myself have filled out. Mothers. And I failed to mention in my post last year that we are the designated tertiary/quaternary level L&D/Antepartum care unit for a five state region, including Alaska. We manage, or manage as well as the patient can be managed, patients who have something seriously wrong with their pregnancy, or something seriously wrong themselves (think solid organ transplant patients, or TOF patients, or Marfan's patients), or both. The latter is by far the most common. And this was before SARS2-nCoV-19 decided to pay the world a visit.
We have seen some shit, is what I am saying.
More on a positive note, our unit was, in partnership with the teaching hospitals of Harvard, Yale, and Emory, both the first university-affiliated hospital and the first university-affiliated unit to safely deliver an infant to a patient with active COVID-19. We changed, and are still changing through continuing studies, how pregnant women known to be infected with COVID-19 are managed, worldwide.
We are lucky, so lucky. We lost an aggregate total of only 19 L&D/Antepartum nurses and support staff out of a pool of probably 180. Other units, smaller and larger, lost many, many more. It should be noted that across the system, we lost nursing and support staff to things not d/t COVID-19 infection--suicide being a popular choice.
Now, as we head into the week of 6 June 2021, we have an influx of new nurses, right ahead of an expected surge of COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization, and yes, it's a little rough. We are all damaged goods now, and that is what it is.
Also, if you are one of those people who think that things will return to "normal", next week or month or year, or just as soon as wherever you are reopens, well, here's the thing. There is no going back to November 2019. There is no return to what we had as our "normal". If you don't understand, or some idiot friend or family member doesn't understand, think of it like this: 2019 is 9/10/2001, and 2021 forward is 9/12/2001. Much simpler.
Side note: for whatever reason, and it's bizarre, just over 1/3 of my (mostly new) colleagues on nights are natural redheads. Second is natural blonde, and then gray (some former redheads in there, too), with natural very dark brunettes like myself coming in dead last. FFS, one of my Black colleagues has naturally red hair. Google that shit. It's a thing.