March 17, 2020 745 pm
Letting my anxiety about going to work tomorrow get the best of me. I don’t want to go. But I have to go. I have no one to depend on but myself. And honestly I may need to think about leaving the bedside after this. There’s a fucking pandemic. And when I’m not thinking about that I’m thinking how is my marriage over? Woke up to a message from him asking if I was okay with work and the virus. I responded politely because it’s a pandemic and I think that’s appropriate. I am not okay. I don’t even know what alternate fucking universe we’re living in right now. Half the world is literally closed. Yesterday they closed the gyms, the movie theaters and restaurants can only offer take out. Schools are closed for a month. 6,000 people died so far and it’s going to get worse. I don’t want to go to work. I’m afraid to get sick and die and leave my kids without a mother. I won’t give into the fear. I have to go to work or we’ll go under. We won’t have a house or anything if I don’t go.
Well, 2020 was quite the life-altering year for a lot of us. I wrote that journal entry as the world shut down. I cried on my way to work because I was afraid and sometimes I was the only person on the road, which only served to make me feel more afraid.
Am I the only person dumb enough to keep going to work?
A few nurses quit immediately with no notice at all. They’ve got parents or spouses with cancer, autoimmune diseases, or compromised children. They’re just gone.
How were they able to go?
No, no, no—we did not sign up for this. A pandemic was an unfathomable half a page in a textbook that would never happen in our lifetime.
Never. I most certainly did not sign up for this!
At night I cried again as I walked down the hospital corridor, cried as the double doors slid open, and cried again when the air hit my face for the first time in over twelve and a half hours. Sometimes much longer because so many nurses call out on each shift that it takes the staffing office a long time to figure out where to send the nurses who actually did show up. I cried again walking out to my car because I felt so grateful.
Thank you GOD, I survived another shift.
In the parking lot, I remove my outer mask with clean gloves on and discard it. I carefully remove my N95, one rubber band at a time away from my face, and place it in a paper bag with my name on it. The paper bag because we don’t have enough masks for everyone anymore.
What do you mean you don’t know when we’ll get more?
I discard the gloves and sanitize my hands. I keep a jug of sanitizer in my car and my phone sealed in a plastic baggie all day. I hardly even look at my phone when I’m at work, nor did it ever use to buzz this much before.
Why are all these people texting me?
I arrive home and deposit my shoes outside of the back door. My kids leave my robe in the entryway and each night I strip down in the cold basement and throw my scrubs in a hot water wash. A lot of nurses change out of their scrubs at work, but I just want to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. If I am too tired to start the wash then I’ll seal them in a garbage bag. The kids clear a path and know not to bother asking how my day was because they know my simple answer to that simple question, will be always be “bad”. They know not to come near me, much less touch me, as I walk through the house on the way to the shower.
Please don’t even ask how my day was.
They say don’t share a bathroom if you’re exposed to the virus, but we only have one.
Who are they?
I proceed to the shower where I use my own dedicated bar of soap and spray the entire room down with Lysol when I’m finished—the tub, the faucets, the door handle, the light switch. I seal the bar of soap in another plastic baggie and place it in the cabinet then obsessively spray the cabinet as well. My one job for the last eighteen years has been to keep these kids safe and goddamn it I will keep them safe if it is the last thing I do.
It just might be.
I don’t remember for how long I didn’t touch or hug my kids.
Weeks? A month? Two months maybe?
No one will come near us, not even their dad, as the world attempts to figure out exactly what plague has overtaken the planet. This part I don’t mind. The pandemic locked my three busy children in the house. I got to have them all at home with me the way I did when they were babies and I don’t mind one damn bit. The kids tease me that my life hasn’t really changed with the lock-down. I still go to work and I still go to the grocery store.
I don’t go to the gym anymore, but only because it’s closed.
See, I am an ambivert—only an extrovert when it suits me and sometimes it doesn’t suit me for years at a time. This is one of my introverted eras. The kids and I bake bread, build a pea-gravel patio, do one-thousand piece puzzles and plant tomatoes with some help from our Italian neighbor Joe, who happens to be a gardening master. We ration our food and wonder if we will get to the bottom of this fifty pound bag of rice before the lock-down ends.
We will.
Some days I feel like a goddamn pioneer woman. Other days I lay on the couch and watch the six seasons of Gossip Girl from start to finish. Tiger King and Joe Exotic are the only things that can get me to laugh or crack a smile. Alex, my first daughter, dusts off her flute and plays for us. This is her senior year of high school that has been erased. Later, she told me she went home one day in March of 2020 and never saw most of her classmates again.
How is this even possible?
Chloe blasts Defying Gravity when it’s her night to wash the dishes. On the odd calendar days, the sound of Idina Menzel’s earth shattering mezzo-soprano floods our kitchen, the one we used to dance in.
I’m through accepting limits
‘Cause someone says they’re so
Some things I cannot change
But till I try, I’ll never know
Too long I’ve been afraid of
Losing love, I guess I’ve lost
Well, if that’s love, it comes at much too high a cost
I promise my younger daughter that we will go see the show again when this is all over. If I survive, I think to myself.
I swear to God I will. Please just let me survive.
I neatly type out a list of instructions and information for my kids. I don’t have enough anything to even contemplate completing a formal last will and testament—here kids, my social security number, life insurance policy number and retirement account information for you guys. Here you will also find the phone number of Human Resources and our landlord.
Sorry, that’s all I got.
I know if I die from working in this pandemic, my kids will have their dad because he is safely working from home, which is ironic because he certainly never worked from the home we shared for eleven years. I place the sealed envelope in my nightstand and do not tell a soul what I’ve done.
They’ll find it.
The hospital in March of 2020 is almost indescribable. Most of the supplies are gone, along with half the staff that’s—out with Covid, out with suspected Covid, or just needed a break from all the Covid—on any given day.
Everyone now walking around with neon-colored, flowered fucking shower caps on their heads for Christ’s sake, as if this were a perfectly normal and every day occurrence, because we don’t have hair covers either anymore.
We don’t fucking have anything anymore here!
The supply rooms are bare—thread bare, practically empty and we don’t have— enough isolation gowns to keep us clean, a lot of wipes to keep the patient’s clean and we don’t have any of the fucking mouth care kits that we use to clean a ventilated patients mouth, every two hours without fail.
We must do this or the patient’s will get a VAP, a ventilator-associated pneumonia and then we will get a ding from the government.
Even though we never did have enough people or supplies before.
No, we don’t have enough ANYTHING anymore and oddly enough, there are no rules anymore. We drink Tequila and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot after work some nights. Sometimes if it’s raining, we smoke our cigarettes in the dirty linen truck parked out behind the loading dock. Now there’s a refrigerated morgue truck out there.
We also used to smoke in that linen truck before.
In every medication and supply room—in every corner of the hospital, there are people—crying, screaming, yelling, breaking down, cursing—and you name it, losing their shit.
Losing it.
Except for visitors because we do not have any visitors anymore—they’re not allowed to sit and hold their own mother’s hand for Christ’s sake, soothe her for a change, as she takes her last goddamn breath.
“I’m sorry,” I tell them over the phone, “I just don’t know, the rules change every day.”
Lies, the rules change by the hour over here.
The ED took the worst hit and it looks something out of a bad sci-fi movie with all the red hazmat signs and hermetically-sealed entrance for Christ’s sake. Those nurses—well those nurses look wounded and scarred, look like they’ve been to a goddamn war instead of to a job for the last few weeks. Weeks? Now, I can only see their eyes because of their masks.
I don’t recognize a single one of them anymore.
No, I still haven’t entirely processed March of 2020. I tucked it inside the box inside of my head, the one labeled ‘things I prefer to never to think about again’ and buried it somewhere.
I can’t remember where I put it.
More nurses quit, some clock out after an especially bad shift and are never to be seen again.
Where the hell did they go? What happened to Jen Y?
The signs in the break room say maximum four people, the chairs are spread six feet apart, but again we don’t care at all anymore. We sit and eat together anyway.
What are they gonna do, fire us?
Signs from local elementary school children brighten our hallways thanking us for-showing up, reminding us we are their heroes, and telling us to just keep swimming.
How did those innocent babies know we were drowning?
All of the hand sanitizers have been ripped from the walls. I have no clue if it’s because they were stolen or if the hospital removed them. I am standing in the medication room one day and a patient pounds on the glass door.
Pounds!
“I’m getting the fuck out of here NOW,” he barks at me. He’s not even my patient.
He looks terrified, this big, burly and shirtless man, who is covered in tattoos. The real tough guys do not ever don the hospital gown. “I’m not wearing that fucking dress,” they always declare.
Another patient won’t let me in her room, screams at me not to touch her, and to get the hell out! I notify her physician, document it in her chart and move on. I know she’s afraid and I can’t even say that I blame her.
I don’t have time to fucking argue with this bitch anymore.
Each day a bulletin tells us how many confirmed or suspected Covid patients are here now and the hospital sets up a command center, a real one—not at all like the one we practice every year.
No, not at all.
In the morning we line up at the nursing office to pick up our personal protective equipment, our PPE. It’s all very Grey’s Anatomy except it does not stop at the end of sixty minutes. It goes on and on—to be continued each-mother-fucking-week-for-multiple-seasons with only a brief hiatus and more than a few cliffhangers!
Wow, I didn’t see that coming! Did you?
The patients trickle in—one by one, like a leaky faucet until that number is well over a hundred and no one gives a flying fuck about the bulletin anymore. They code—meaning they arrest, their hearts stop, and then—they code again.
CODE BLUE
Then, they code some more—and then, they start to die and they die, die, die.
So many die.
That goddamn intercom sounds all goddamn day now. I bet it sounds more times in 2020 than in the previous fourteen years that I have been an ICU nurse— combined.
Beeep
Beeeep
Beeeeep
Code Blue
Code Blue
Code Blue
What the fuck, again!?! How is that possible?
We stop and listen for the location of the code. Now where?
In the hospital we don’t ever say the patient died, we say they expired because expired is a softer way to deliver that particular crushing life blow. If they expire, another patient will fill their bed not long after. Rarely do I ever—cry over this, especially at work.
I’m so fucking used to this shit.
Years back, a young nurse had tearfully asked me if my tear ducts were clogged or if I even had them.
There is something wrong with you.
“You are The Ice Queen,” she said with a mix of disgust and admiration. “I don’t understand how you never cry.”
Oh I do honey, but I’m not gonna tell you how I do it.
We were in front of room ten and watched as a beautiful young, and I do mean young, woman crawled into bed next to her young husband as they removed his life support. We rolled him over to the side so she could slide onto the bed with him. They were newlyweds, and it was a short honeymoon indeed.
Jesus, they’re so goddamn young.
Turn it off.
We watched, in complete and utter silence, as the young woman got to lay next to her new husband one last time and put her hand over his chest to feel his last breath—the one that goes in, but not out. That breath is exhaled when we roll the corpse on it’s side in order to perform the post-mortem care.
Soon, he’ll go quick.
I wonder if that’s how they sleep at home?
No you don’t.
Turn it off.
The young couple’s family members stood in the room—room ten, in the summer of 2011 or was it 2012?—holding each other steady, trying to stifle their sobs and not disrupt the sacred silence that overtakes the room.
It always does in the end.
It’s okay, you’ve seen it before.
You know what happens next.
Shut it off.
You’ve been doing this a long time, you know what to do—
Don’t you dare cry.
Shut it all the way off.
All of the other nurses, six of them I believe, stood outside of room ten and cried—except for one.
That’s me, The Ice Queen.
Shut down complete.
Now it’s the lost summer of 2020 and I am in room seven this time—I never liked that room, or ten for that matter, but I don’t remember why.
Bullshit— I do, but it’s in the box somewhere.
I am holding my phone in its plastic baggie and standing over the comatose face of a young trauma patient who had the great misfortune, of falling from a great height— in a fucking pandemic.
My patient has suffered a massive brain injury, so a ventilator is breathing for him. I have downloaded an app so I can video call the families without them seeing my phone number. The hospital only has two iPad’s and you have to reserve them and I do not have time for that either.
I do not have time for anything anymore because I now have three critically-ill patients instead of the usual recommended two.
What? NO, I can’t. I’m good, but I’m not that good—none of us are.
My patient is peacefully sedated and what we, in the ICU, like to call “riding the vent”— meaning he is complying with the ventilator by letting the machine do all of the sometimes difficult work of breathing for him. His family only sees that ugly, horrifying, eight-centimeter tube—one of the many tubes that are rising up out of his head, where it is tightly secured, adhered actually, to the side of his face.
Thankfully they didn’t see the bloody battle to place that tube. Hear the anesthesiologist say,
Fuck!! Give me a size 8, can I get some fucking cricoid pressure?
“It’s just like breathing through a big straw,” I tell the family with my reassuring smile. The one I’ve perfected after all these years. It sits perfectly atop of the resting bitch face that I’ve also perfected over the years, one that I do still hear is pretty from time to time. Not as often as I used to hear it, but I know, aging is a privilege, so it does suck a little less.
Smile pretty girl, it’s not so bad.
Where was I?
That endotracheal tube is much, much wider than a straw and is jammed twenty-three centimeters down his throat, where it rests about three centimeters above his carina— that point which divides the right and left lungs.
If he were not sedated or maybe if his brain were functioning more than it currently is, he would undoubtedly rip that tube out— in the blink of an eye.
Undoubtedly. I wish he would.
So I’ve got both of his hands tied just as tight to the bed frame—just in case he decides to wake up on my shift and I’m not in his room.
I cannot literally be in there every second.
Another tube protrudes from his left nostril and is angrily taped to his forehead.
I still hate that little pop I feel when I pass that tube.
“This is how we feed him for right now,” I say as I wonder for the first time in years if I sound like I know what the hell I’m doing.
Years!
I worry that surely my voice must sound about three octaves too high to them.
I haven’t had these thoughts for years.
His eyes are blackened and swollen shut and there is dried blood all over his face, no matter how many times I have attempted to clean it off before I called them.
I tried my hardest to clean you up, but I didn't want to hurt you or rip any scabs open.
I conceal the tube that is lodged deep in the right ventricle of his brain, the ugliest one of them all, and wrap it in a towel because we don’t have the fucking disposable blue chuck pads anymore. That tube is connected to the monitor which will tell me, among many things, just how high his intracranial pressure is.
Damn it! It is still way too high.
Come on kid, help me out a little here. Please buddy. I know you can hear me and I am begging you to just move your thumb.
His family doesn't see all of that though and I know this— even if they can’t be here in person to remind me, to show me his pictures and tell me cute stories about who he really is.
Aw, look how cute he was back then!
I know they see their son or perhaps even their baby—or maybe even see their toddler taking his first wobbly steps.
That’s it, come to mommy!
I know they see their little boy, the one with all the freckles, playing catch in the backyard with all of his friends who can’t be here now either.
Good catch buddy!
I know they see that handsome young man in his crisp tuxedo with a fresh haircut on his way to the prom— only a few short years ago.
Hey! Give your mother a kiss before you go.
I know he’s only a stupid kid that was playing around.
I fucking know because you are only 3 years older than my own firstborn.
The boy’s family has gathered outdoors in a socially distanced circle and even grandma is there risking her life, to see the blood-stained face of that boy.
She’s too old to care if she gets sick and dies.
The boy’s family doesn’t care at all about all of the goddamn rules anymore either and would do anything, even gather in a pandemic—to catch a glimpse of him.
One by one the excited loved ones pass the phone around to each other in that circle as if they were there to see a newborn baby. I hold my phone over the boy’s face and stare at it.
Open your eyes. Come on, they love you so much.
I stand and listen as his family and friends offer their words of encouragement, their thoughts and prayers, and tell him just how very much, they all love him.
I don’t have time for this either, but who fucking cares?
What are they going to do—fire me if I don’t finish all of my charting?
We will see you soon!
No, I don’t think you will—
Just get better!
No, I don’t think he will and neither do you. Your voice sounds too high
We love you so much! You’re going to beat this!
No, not this time. Your voice sounds really high—
You’re going to be okay.
No, he won’t—
What is wrong with me?
We miss you so much!
Yes, I know.
Oh my God I fucking know.
Grandma visibly recoils at the sight of the boy and starts to cry. “It’s grandma,” she says her voice trembling and cracking.
Her voice is way too high.
A shaky, “I love you,” is all she can muster as she waves the phone away while I start to shake uncontrollably.
She just can’t. I can’t either—
He will die before her and he will die without any of them there and Goddamn it this life is so fucking unfair!!
I haven’t had this thought either in years.
I am off to the side as the tears begin to pour out of me with such brute force that I hear them audibly SPLAT,—shocking even me as they hit the side rail of his bed three feet below my face.
What is happening?
The side rail is instantly saturated with my tears that are now beating down upon it like a flash flood without any warning.
The whole room begins to spin.
I can’t breathe with this fucking mask on.
My life would never be the same after that moment.
I did not know in that exact moment— in room seven of the Trauma ICU, that I had been broken open and finally learned that I was allowed to cry too.
Am I though?
My brand new, ever-the-hero husband told the whole world he had to live apart from me in order to keep his own daughter safe from Covid.
Never mind the fact he had stomped out one Friday night in February, Valentine’s Day 2020 if I wanted to be specific— the month before it even began.
Best. Gift. Ever.
I did not know that he would not come back— the way he had always come back any of the other times we fought—which was often—or that never again would we live together as husband and wife.
True story. Did I mention that it was the best gift ever?
Nor did I know that my first husband, the one with whom I enjoyed a contentious-at-best relationship with in the eight years since our mutually agreed upon divorce, would once again become a good friend. Together we would guide our three children through the pandemic.
Terrible gift giver, but he’s really not so bad after all.
I could not have known that something called a donut effect on the real estate market, would hollow out all of the nearby cities and literally overfill the New Jersey suburbs where I lived with home buyers in search of more sweet space.
Yummy!
Nope. I did not know the real estate market would boom, the interest rates would plummet, the housing prices would skyrocket—or that my nice landlord would decide to sell the little rental house I loved, in three days flat— just for funsies.
Why is this happening to me?
I did not know that investors with mountains of cash would then snatch and gulp up nearly ALL of the houses on the market in my price range— rendering me, a healthcare hero, homeless and displaced.
Fuckers. All I got was a lawn sign.
Nope. I could not have ever known that I would soon find myself sleeping on the floor of a tiny apartment, along with my three kids who did at least have beds, for the next two years.
I am sleeping on the fucking floor because of some bullshit game and I hate everyone.
Nope. I did not know that on March 17th of 2020, I made a choice. I chose to go to work in a pandemic and that I always have a choice. I made a choice to use my gifts as a nurse to serve, plus feed and house my family.
Hence I surrendered the outcome.
I don’t want to go. But I have to go.
I would come to surrender the outcome over and over again as I battled the both the pandemic and the real estate market.
Please, I surrender.
I would learn that I could no longer protect my children from the harsh reality that is life.
I tried my hardest.
The pandemic would teach my children what I already knew from all my years spent working as an ICU nurse—
This life is a precious gift denied to many, death is our sole certainty and the only constant we can depend on is change.
We’re okay, we’re all still here. Hindsight is indeed 20/20 and it’s no coincidence that the year that permanently altered my world, and the world of so many others, is another way of saying—
Perfect vision.
Crystal clear.
The year 2020 would eventually show me everyone who loved me, everyone who did not and that the person who loved me the least, was actually me.
No, that’s not possible?
Life would become even harder than I could have ever imagined in the two years that followed. I was about to be stripped bare of everything I depended on, much like the supplies in the supply room.
Mom, listen to me please, I can’t believe it—everything is fucking gone here.
The supply chain had vanished, just like my husband, and I was going to have to learn new methods in order to cope, survive and eventually thrive and come out on top.
Trust and believe it baby.
The validation and support from the outside world would taper off and cease to matter as both the never ending pandemic and the wild real estate market raged on.
Oh I raged too.
I also did not know that all of the governing bodies of healthcare and the Treasury, would soon either be nowhere in sight, or completely useless.
Fuck you both forever by the way.
I did not know yet that none of the rules, the BIG ones I lived and died by— no longer applied. The only person I would be accountable to was myself. I would go on to take it all way back to basics, as I searched for ways to do my job well enough and find a good enough home.
I search for the highest good for all.
I had no clue back then, but our thoughts all become our actions and our thoughts do indeed become our things, but oh— was I about to learn.
Yes, back then I was clueless and knew next-to-nothing, but I did know this—
I was a good goddamn nurse and I would do anything for my children.
P.S. You will see it when you believe it.
February 21, 2020 Happy to go to work today, I need the distraction. 2020 is the year of the nurse. This is my year. I claim it even if I’m not sure I believe it anymore. I can’t say in the name of Jesus because I’m not sure how much I believe anymore, but I do believe in The Universe and I do believe that you are your thoughts, that you create your own reality and I created this one. I’m focused on the feelings that I feel. MY wounds that get triggered over and over, why I put up with this to start with. Not in a what’s wrong with me way, but in a what the hell? I’m a caretaker. I have dedicated my life to taking care of other people. It’s exhausting. So if I could just suck it up now for just a little bit. Do the work to really heal myself. I can build the life that I want. So tomorrow I will figure out what the hell that is...
Kristin, I have so many tears it's hard to type this. All I can say is everyone should read this piece and so many, many in leadership should be held accountable to the death, destruction and madness that you and so many others and families endured and are still enduring. I have learned that grief is not only reserved for death and gratitude is reserved for those strong enough to carry on and forgive (what's done) but NEVER forget. Our strength is our resolve. There can never be a "next time." I want to reach through this app and hug you tight. Thank you for pouring your heart and speaking truth to light. Love, deb ox
How did I miss this one? Wow! You are so incredibly blessed with the gifts Kristin. Besides empathy and caring for people you are also brave. Thank you for doing what you did, and what you continue to do now — try to make people well. Thank you for sharing your space with us, and opening your heart. ♥️ 🥰