Massachusetts health care workers reflect on ‘overwhelming’ year of treating coronavirus patients
Medical workers for a year have been sprinting a marathon with no finish line in sight, an exhausting and “overwhelming” 365 days of unprecedented loss that has taken its toll, health care workers told the Herald one year after coronavirus patients started flooding hospitals.
But finally, there is some hope as cases and hospitalizations trend downward amid the vaccine rollout, they noted.
From the “overwhelming feeling of helplessness” last spring to the fear of bringing the virus home, here is what Bay State medical workers shared with the Herald this week:
The unknown virus
Because it was such a new virus, medical workers were struggling to figure out how to treat patients.
“It was an overwhelming feeling of helplessness,” said Dr. Dilip Nataraj, chair of Critical Care Medicine at South Shore Hospital. “There wasn’t a known effective treatment at that point, so it left us feeling helpless. We were treating patients in the best way we knew, based on information from around the world, but there was so much unknown.”
The devastating loss
More than 16,000 people in Massachusetts have died from the virus in a year. Of the 16,123 confirmed deaths, at least 8,748 people died in hospitals.
“Seeing that loss has been so difficult on all of our staff,” Nataraj said. “In the ICU, we see by far the most ill patients in the hospital, but COVID was very different in terms of the number of deaths.
“And trying to move past that each time you go to work is a major challenge,” he added. “It was really a mental challenge for everybody.”
Victoria Shanahan, a home care nurse with South Shore VNA, lost a patient who she was very close with for three years. She would check in on him a couple times a week.
“It hits you hard,” Shanahan said. “Watching someone you know deteriorate and slowly succumb to it is tough. It’s really tough.”
The fear of bringing it home
One of the medical workers’ worst nightmares has been bringing the virus home to their families. Workers have stayed at hotels, set up RVs in their backyards, or camped out in their basement to seal themselves away from loved ones.
“It’s been so stressful worrying that I’m going to bring this home to my family,” Shanahan said.
She takes her work clothes off at the door, her shoes don’t go inside the house, and she jumps right in the shower.
The PTSD from the spring wave
Starting in late November, patients started to flood the hospitals again.
“I remember a staff member saying to me, ‘I’m not sure I can do this again,’ ” Nataraj recalled. “There has been a lot of PTSD from the spring wave, and everyone is so exhausted.”
The coping
That mental exhaustion and trauma has been hard to shake, partly because workers weren’t able to enjoy social outlets they normally looked forward to in the pre-pandemic world.
Talking to other colleagues has been key, Nataraj said.
“Telling them about cases and hearing on the other end about a similar experience helps all of us know that everybody is going through a similar thing,” he said.
The road ahead
After a trauma-filled year, health care workers will now come out of survival mode and begin to process all they have been through, according to Dr. Pooja Saraff, a clinical psychologist with UMass Memorial Health Care.
Saraff said many workers are starting to breathe a sigh of relief with coronavirus rates going down and vaccination rates going up, but “what’s going to be hard is to make sense of what has happened.”
Many workers experienced feelings of hopelessness, helplessness, depression and anxiety during the last year of pandemic peaks, and a chronic stress response to trauma, loss and grief is still present, Saraff said.
But she said many organizations have responded well by offering additional support to staff such as counseling and mindfulness resources.
“We are starting the process of seeing the end, so now the healing can begin,” Saraff said.
Reflections on the tough times have begun for many front-line workers and will continue. Processing a prolonged, collective trauma takes a prolonged period of time.
Saraff said, “We are more resilient than we know but we do need each other to get through this.”
The hope
As hospitalizations have gone down in the last several weeks amid the vaccine rollout, there is some light at the end of the tunnel for workers.
Nataraj said, “It is a big source of hope for everyone.”
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2OBEtAJ
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