“I have always been a caregiver. When I was younger, I was the one who took care of the younger cousins and then when my grandparents - my great grandmother and my grandmother - when they got sick, I was the one who took care of them a lot. So going into a profession like nursing just seemed to make sense.
Because of this virus, it has made it difficult to touch our patients in the same way. The physicality of nursing - we’re always touching our patients to care for them. And when you’re doing it in this layer of PPE that is hot and uncomfortable and you have this layer of fear on top of that, it doesn’t feel like we’re doing the same kind of job. Like, you don’t want to contract it and you don’t want to spread it to other people - and we’re trying to minimize how much we’re in the rooms… we’re not really doing all of that intimate care that we normally do.
One day I had been having just a particularly hard day, like, had already seen a lot of people pass away. But there was one thing that really kind of made me laugh and brought some tears to my eyes. And it seems like something so simple and silly but there are lots of drawings and thank you notes posted all over all of the units. A lot from younger kids. And there was this one in particular that was a rainbow and something else and it said , “YOU’RE AWESOME” but was totally spelled wrong. And it was so big that it really stuck out. So walking out and seeing that really touched my heart because it was like ‘Ok, these are the people that we’re doing this for.’ There are still like these sweet little children out there in the world who are hopeful and learning and have everything ahead of them.” #nolabeings #neworleans
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