Pandemic front line ‘living nightmare’ for nurses

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This article was published 26/03/2022 (1042 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After two years on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, Manitoba nurses have a message for the public: we’re not OK.

The toll of being overworked due to staff shortages and surrounded by trauma — at levels much more than they expected when taking up their profession — has worn them thin.

“I watched people suffocate to death every day for a really long time,” said Rose, not her real name but the one the Free Press will use to conceal her identity for worries of reprisal at work and in the community.

For the last two years, Rose has been working primarily on COVID-19 units. She did not mince words about the experience.

“Work has just been a living nightmare,” she said in an interview. “I’ve reached that point where people ask you how you’re doing, and you can’t just say ‘fine’ anymore.”

At points during the pandemic, Rose would work every shift on the COVID ward. Each shift, she said, someone either died or “coded,” meaning they suffered cardiopulmonary arrest requiring nurses to rush into resuscitative efforts.

She recalled watching COVID patients deteriorate quickly; their oxygen supply being notched higher and higher, until finally calling for them to be moved to intensive care.

Sometimes, they’d remain conscious, she said, terror in their faces hearing her call for intubation. Sometimes, she’d run down the hallway, holding the patient’s hand during transport, “like something out of hospital TV shows.”

“They’d say: ‘I’m scared, I’m scared,’” Rose said, her voice trembling. “I’d say you’re going to be OK. I didn’t know that. But that’s what you say.”

Rose said she expected to encounter similar traumas when she decided to become a nurse. But the scale on which it occurred the past two years has impacted her mental health; the stress of the pandemic has left its mark.

Once a “wildly social person,” Rose said she has become increasingly shut off from the world, to the point of “slight agoraphobia.” She has found herself, day-after-day, crying in the shower, to which she runs directly after getting home from work and throwing her scrubs into the laundry.

All of these stresses — common stories among colleagues, Rose said — were made worse by a lack of rest.

Staffing shortages have plagued nurses throughout the pandemic, as positive tests, close contacts and early retirements decimated staff, Rose said.

Another nurse — Jake — recalls an incident where a patient went into cardiopulmonary arrest. He performed chest compressions as other nurses stood by unable to help because of protocols to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

When it was done, there was no time to recover.

“Immediately, I had to go into another patient’s room and do something else, still shaking, sweating. And that’s not a rare thing: that’s just one that typifies the feeling of helplessness and the feeling of responsibility you have for another life literally in your hands,” he said.

Jake said he believes he’s learned to deal with the trauma of these past two years, but “I’m having a panic attack talking about it.”

Whatever his state now, he admits the first year or so of the pandemic weighed heavily on him.

“I’d be having a conversation with my wife, and she’d be moving her mouth, and I wasn’t listening at all. I was just always on a hamster wheel full of all the badness and all the sadness… I wasn’t able to shake that,” he said.

Manitoba Nurses Union president Darlene Jackson said such stories are now rampant among members.

“They are exhausted. Some of them are using the words ‘burnt out’ or ‘morally distressed’ or ‘morally injured,’” she said.

Rose spoke about moral injury, explaining it as the distress of being too worn out and too busy to give the compassionate care she became a nurse to provide.

Jake exemplified this when he recalled the gut-wrenching feeling of closing the door on weeping, isolated patients, as he hurried to help the next.

Jackson said the past two years have been “devastating” for nurses — and pointed to lacking support.

“This government and the federal government have to recognize that this pandemic and this nursing shortage go hand-in-hand with mental health,” she said. “They need to provide services that front-line workers and nurses can access without barriers to get the help they need, when they need it.”

(The union leader said nurses have coverage for counselling but counsellors are overwhelmed with the demand.)

It’s crucial government act to bolster staff numbers, Jackson said.

There are currently about 2,700 vacant nursing positions in Manitoba, she said. Making matters even more dire, the average age of a nurse in Manitoba is 47 and retirements are on the horizon.

While the province needs to make nursing more attractive for potential students, even then, recruits will not be in the field for three years, the union leader said, calling for moves to accelerate the training of internationally trained professionals.

The province also needs to do everything in its power to retain every nurse it currently has “to keep this health-care system afloat,” Jackson said.

A spokesperson for Manitoba Health said the province offers financial aid for internationally educated nurses; has added 60 nursing positions in ICUs across four hospitals; and has funded the addition of 259 nurse training seats across five post-secondary institutions and intends to add 400 “nursing education seats,” all in an effort to address staffing shortages.

fpcity@freepress.mb.ca