Quoted from a Salt Lake City TV station’s website:
Robin Grigg’s patient, struggling to breathe, looked at her and asked what was wrong with him. She showed him his positive COVID-19 test results, knowing it was not the first time he had seen them.
“No,” he said. “COVID’s not real. I don’t have COVID.”
He wouldn’t budge. Eventually, they just decided not to talk about it, and she continued to provide life-saving medical care for someone who didn’t believe his condition was real. … “Imagine not being able to breathe and still not believing it’s real,” the former ICU nurse at University of Utah Health said.
[Readers: Note she’s a former ICU nurse. More about that below. — Ed.]
“They will have disregarded medical advice and gotten COVID at a party. It makes it nearly impossible to have empathy for them. They’ll be on like eight infusions, their toes are turning black, tubes are everywhere, teeth have been knocked out from intubation, they’ll be puffy and swollen and bruised, and they still won’t believe it.”
Grigg comes from a family of health care professionals and she always wanted to work in health care. She felt like she was born to do it. But now she’s afraid to tell people she’s a nurse because of the backlash that frequently comes with it because of politics. During the holidays last year, she deleted all her social media because it was too hard on her … to see people disregarding public health recommendations when she and her fellow health care workers were pulling out all the stops to try to keep people alive … the stress was enough that she … decided she had to step away from working in the ICU in January. Now … she doesn’t treat critical COVID-19 patients.
* * *
Kirsten Roberts Pusey describes her typical day in the surge ICU … as “just straight anxiety all the time.” …
Nurses ending their shifts catch her up on the patients, … and then she’s off running, securing breathing apparatuses, flipping patients onto their bellies … and sedating and intubating the critical patients. Because the patients are on their stomachs, the ventilator tube is secured with a string with their faces to the side.
“You always have a lot of anxiety as a nurse when you’re around patients on a ventilator because their life depends on that tube being in the right place and you can’t get to their airway easily. Anything at any point could ruin this. If it comes out, that would kill them instantly,” she said. …
“They’re so, so sick, in this completely helpless position … naked, paralyzed, sedated on their stomach, having all their functions done for them,” she said. Grigg explained it as being surrounded by a living graveyard, with the patients being “like dead bodies we were keeping alive on machines.”
“I literally felt like I was taking care of corpses,” she added.
* * *
“After a week full of death …, Jane Goodfellow stood with the other ICU nurses … as a visitor in charge of spiritual care asked them how they were holding up. …
Drinking has become a commonplace coping mechanism for nurses who are pushed past the limit of their mental capacity to handle trauma every single shift, Goodfellow explained.
* * *
One nurse told a story of a young couple flown in from out of state because there happened to be a spare ICU bed at her hospital. The husband had COVID-19, and his wife stayed by his side every day during his treatment and built relationships with the nurses.
When he died suddenly and unexpectedly, the nurses arranged for the wife to stay with his body for several hours — one nurse staying past the end of her shift to help care for the woman who didn’t have family nearby. Eventually, another nurse drove the woman to a hotel, where the off-duty health care worker spent the night looking after the grieving widow until she could go home to her family.
This story is about ICU nurses’ mental health issues, PTSD, and burnout. (For those details, go here.) I edited all of that out, to focus my readers’ attention on what happens to unvaccinated people who get Covid-19 and end up in ICUs on life support and then die. Nearly all the ICU patients and deaths are among the unvaccinated these days. It’s so bad Biden is trying to make people get vaccinated, but I don’t believe that’ll work. By posting this, I’m trying to persuade them to get vaccinated, but I think they’ll cling to their beliefs, get sick, and die.
Related stories:
The next big thing in poison control centers: “Anti-vaxxers are now experimenting fighting Covid by ingesting Betadine, an anti-bacterial topical solution used for cuts and scrapes and in douches. Betadine is highly toxic and poisonous when ingested.” See tweet here.
Trump blames Democrats for vaccine hesitancy among Republicans. His reasoning? He alleges they said, “if Trump came up with it, I’ll never take it.” Trumpers don’t trust the vaccines because Democrats told them not to? Really? Read story here.