PHOTOS: How 9 Health Workers Stay Strong In A Pandemic Year
To be a health care worker in the best of times includes days of stress, sorrow, frustration, triumph, joy and reflection — not always in that order. This past year was all of that on warp speed, as the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.
To mark the one year anniversary of that declaration, we've photographed and interviewed nine healthcare workers from around the globe, serving very different communities but all with the same goal: conquering COVID-19. We especially wanted to know: What has surprised them most over the past year? And how have they managed to cope with all the stress?
Diving For Solace
A colleague of Dr. Storm Bissict's was the first serious case of COVID her hospital had seen of one of their own staff. His health deteriorated to the point that he needed a tube inserted to help him breathe — intubation, often the last line of defense for COVID patients.
"We both knew full well what the chances of survival post intubation were at that point," she says. Before they started the intubation, her colleague — a husband and father of two — asked Bissict to pass along messages to his family. Then he turned to her and asked, "What if this is it?"
It's that single moment of intubation that Bissict finds the hardest to deal with — what she calls "those moments of breathlessness when there is no other alternative but to be sedated and connected to the ventilator."
Some of these patients are aware of what is happening but unable to communicate, she says. "They often just don't have the breath to form the words." Others, perhaps the luckier ones, says Bissict, are delirious from too little oxygen. Either way, she says, the moment of fear when they're not able to breathe is always there.
