Hearts on the frontline

THE ICU NURSE

Nicola McArley, 29

Nicola remembers taking a deep breath and bracing herself as the first Covid-19 patient was wheeled into the Intensive Care Unit at Auckland’s Middlemore Hospital, where she has been working for the last four and a half years.

“I was on the first shift with that patient and it was pretty terrifying,” she recalls. “You’re trying to save this person but at the same time you need to be keeping your colleagues and yourself safe. You focus on doing the job, but I remember at the end of that first day feeling very emotional.”

Staff at Middlemore were well prepared for the arrival of Covid-19 patients, says Nicola, whose honeymoon was cancelled because of the pandemic. They’d had fittings for N95 respirator masks, practised putting on personal protective equipment (PPE) properly and trialled different scenarios, like how best to turn patients onto their stomachs (thought to be the optimal position for those with the virus). Partitions had been created around beds in the open-plan ICU and negative air pressure was introduced, in the hope of limiting the risk of spread.

“We were prepared, but when those patients roll through the doors, you realise this is something you have never had to deal with before, and you feel pretty anxious,” explains Nicola.

At the time, Spain and Italy were particularly hard hit and hospitals there were struggling to cope with the influx of patients. “In ICU you have a ratio of one nurse to one patient, but we heard that over there it was one nurse to three patients. We didn’t know if we were going to be inundated like that, and how we