April

When I was a new nurse, I worked night shifts. Sometimes when we were slow, they'd say oh go and take a nap in a bed. And.. I would lay there and I'd think: “how many people have died in this bed”? I think of that sometimes, how many people have died in our rooms you know, how much? How much moral distress in these rooms? It's so perfect when it's ready for a new patient but sometimes it can be very chaotic and messy at the end.

People talk about haunted places …they're like, “oh, this train is haunted 12 people died in it” … during COVID sometimes we'll have…sometimes three patients die in the same bed on the same day, you know, and usually somebody will call the chaplain to come and say a prayer over the room, or something, but it looks nice and perfect…. So much craziness goes on in the ICU and you wouldn't know it from those images.

One of our units overlooks the east and in the morning …and you have patients die but you have the most beautiful sunrise behind the patient because it's a full window and, just yeah, the dichotomy, that conflict between what's going on out here versus in there. That happened a lot during COVID …I'm not surprised that nurses are having a hard time getting over that because I don't think we've had a chance as a profession to debrief from that. Who knows if we ever will, as you know, as a society.