Stephen

At the time of the interview, Stephen was in the process of doing various retraining modules to top up her former nursing experience, after returning to the profession in September 2019. This would give her a qualification that would enable her to apply for promotions. She is also a student at Sheffield Hallam University studying for a module in intensive care nursing.

I told Stephen that the interview would last around 30 minutes as I felt this was an appropriate amount of time if perhaps a bit too long for nurses to commit to, but Stephen and I talked for one hour and forty-two minutes. She shared her career of 40 years, the life events such as marriage, children, and how caring for her elderly parents inspired her to change professions and become a teaching assistant for a while.

Such an extensive first interview was helpful because it enabled me to see the types of reflections that nurses might share and explore through photography for this research. She had already thought a little bit about the photographic aspect of the project, but she was nervous about her abilities to take “good” photographs. She'd already suggested that she work with her son who had just bought himself a new camera that he was very excited about; she even knew the length of the lens that he chose, as he was talking about it a lot. She proposed to collaborate with him to make some of the images. I found this exciting as the suggestion came from her; she clearly felt like that would support her to create the type and quality of images that she wanted to share, and I realised that the project could unfold in many more ways than I had expected.

I could sense that she enjoyed the opportunity to talk to someone who isn’t a relative or colleague about the peaks and troughs of her working life, and the timing was ideal as she was speaking from her sofa about work-based challenges while she was resting and off work with a broken kneecap.

She told me about a ritual that is often enacted around death but not part of the rules and regulations governing the hospital; the act of opening a window after someone dies. She told me that families regularly request that she do this with their dying relatives in order to let the soul of their loved one leave the building easily. This was particularly important during Covid, when families couldn’t be present, and the nursing staff were often the main link between families and patients at the end of their lives. She described how she always opened the window anyway, whether asked to or not, as it made sense to her.

Soon the interview became about her experiences of working throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and a particular phrase that she used popped out for me: “it’s like it’s a full colour image in my head”. She used this phrase when recollecting memories of the first moments where it was acknowledged that Covid-19 was a serious and huge virus that had the potential to change her work as she knew it. The atmosphere became more serious after the moment of memory retrieval, and it was evidently a piece of punctuation in her story’s timeline, that marked a before and an after. She travelled back into the image in her head and was re-experiencing some aspects of it

She followed it by saying how “it was just bizarre when faced with your own mortality”. I imagine that being on the inside of a hospital in those moments also marked a distinction between what people outside knew and what you and your colleagues knew. She had the same expression that I often hear myself using when referring back to the start of the pandemic: “initially we all thought it was for a couple of weeks”.

She then spoke about different ways that people washed to protect their loved ones and the lengths that they would go to. She also mentioned the time that it takes to become comfortable and confident in ITU – for her it was 3.5 years. (This is something that I hear a lot and which was exacerbated by Covid when more junior members of staff were sent to fill in gaps).

Stephen told me that she felt that in her current ICU department, people seemed to be able to communicate easily if they weren’t doing well and she spoke about receiving counselling herself to support her experiences of working so intensively throughout the pandemic, helping her to process all that she endured. She then went on to speak more broadly about the sheer scale of the pandemic, and how we will likely still be processing it “forever”. When re-reading the first interview transcript to write this portrait I reflect on how the perspective of someone working inside a hospital with all that they have seen, must feel like a lifetime of processing, an enormous and impossible task. But maybe we all have our own impossible, lifelong processing of the pandemic to do and just don’t realise it in the same way.

I noticed how talk of work and moral distress opens our conversation out in different directions: domestic home life, death, mental health, employment, and rituals.