A Pandemic Nurse's Diary

Download or read book A Pandemic Nurse's Diary written by Nurse T and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-06 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: March 25, 2020 When I walk through the automatic doors into the ICU at 7 AM, I step into a war zone. There are overflowing trash buckets and debris scattered all over the unit. Four red crash carts are outside the rooms, their drawers open and largely empty, witnesses to the chaotic night. One of the patients who coded survived, the three others died. One body in a white plastic shroud is still in a room on theb ed waiting for a stretcher. So opens the personal diary of Nurse T. She is one of the thousands of health care workers in New York City who covered their twelve hour shifts day after day as the Covid-19 virus raged through the city. Her account is personal, poitnant and poetic as she documents the suffering of the poor, largely immigrant patients who flooded the facility seeking treatment. It is also the story of a city, state and federal government that long denied hospitals like hers the funding and support they need to meet current standards. Long starved for funds, the facility's ancient infrasturure and inadequate supplies placed a heavy burden on the staff, who nonetheless walked up the marble stairs all through the crisis and gave their best, whatever the personal cost, whatever the outcome.