Paramedics rushed another important COVID-19 patient into the emergency room, and Chicago nurse Cynthia Riemer felt her adrenaline start.
” Your heart begins racing,” she said. “You’re thinking, ‘How quickly and securely can we get them intubated?’ Because if we do not, in the next 5 or 10 minutes, they might stop breathing. You’re thinking: ‘What’s my next action? Do we need more help?’ The more people in the space, the more exposed, so personnel stand outside the glass door and you state, ‘Hey, get me this! Hey, get me that!'”
Her protective gear: a hospital-supplied yellow dress, foot covers and an N95 mask– plus, from House Depot, a welder’s mask, which she says “assists conserve what we have.”
Riemer is 41, a few years younger than a New Orleans ICU nurse who passed away recently from the infection. She and others became nurses to relieve suffering, to conserve lives. With supply lacks, altering guidelines and developing science, some now are asking: “Did I sign up to be a hero?”
One nurse in Baltimore, a dad with young kids, stated he began to think about quitting his task after checking out a clinical report that stated the infection may spread out not only in beads, but likewise in tinier aerosolized particles. He frets, too, about mask lacks and bad crisis preparation.
” Nobody wants to go to work and seem like they’re betting,” said the nurse, who asked for privacy because he feared retaliation from his employer. “Really few of us enter into this field to be heroes.”
Every day brings brand-new concerns for nurses, who are choosing how much they want to sacrifice, stated Cynda Rushton, teacher of nursing and bioethics at Johns Hopkins University.
” Who am I? What do I mean? How can I have stability in the middle of this mayhem?” she said. “How do I cope with myself at the end of the day?”
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