14 Months

I guess I’m not technically a first responder. But I’ve been on the front lines of COVID since the beginning. I work in a major trauma center. I’m not a doctor or a nurse, but I’m very active in direct patient care and a critical part of the team, particularly with COVID patients. I have PTSD from everything I’ve seen and done in the last 14 months. But I feel dumb saying that. I’m not a veteran, I haven’t survived some horrific event. I don’t think my experience “counts”. I don’t really know the way to describe the way the world stands still when your patients oxygen plummets, and no matter who is there or what we do, nothing helps. There’s this overwhelming feeling of complete helplessness. You stay calm on the outside and reassure your patient like it’s just another day (which, sadly, it is now) while inside you are anything but calm. How do you go to work everyday and be the biggest cheerleader for patients who have been alone, isolated in a room for weeks/months at a time, even though you’re feeling so empty and exhausted yourself? I’m single and live by myself and there’s this feeling of obligation- let ME take the COVID patients. Not the older coworkers, the ones with families and small children. It’s as if I’m saying somehow I’m more disposable. I have less people who care about me that I would risk exposing. It’s a hard position to be in. A close friend’s father had a heart attack in the beginning of COVID. Even though he wasn’t COVID positive, even though he was dying, his family wasn’t allowed in to say goodbye. I offered to go be with him and hold his hand while he passed, to stand in for the family who so desperately wished they could be there. I would do it again and again. But I struggle with how unfair that is, that I got to be with someone’s loved one and they couldn’t be. Working thru COVID has left me anxious and depressed. But I’m alive, I have a great job, and I feel like I have nothing to complain about. Some days that isolation feels like it could drown me.