I was an Overworked Nurse

I was in the COVID unit 75 percent of the time, maybe 80. To be properly staffed, we really needed seven to eight nurses in the unit. But we’d been running at five.

It’d just been hard. ICU is somewhere where, if you have a hole, we got a tube in it, or we can make a hole and put a tube in it. They’re on the ventilator. They have a feeding tube. Often they have one or more chest tubes. I’ve seen up to five. They have a catheter. They have a rectal tube. Patients who, before all of this, would have been on one-to-one care. Now we’re tripling those patients, so one nurse has three people to take care of.

In the first and second waves, all patient care—not just at this hospital—was relegated to the bedside nurses in the COVID ICU