‘I have never felt so helpless’: Front-line workers confront loss Doctors, nurses and first responders grapple with the enormity of what they’ve witnessed during the pandemic’s first wave ....... As he stood in his spacesuit of protective gear, holding his phone in front of the woman’s face so her daughter might see her one last time, Ayoub was indignant that this is what death had become during the coronavirus pandemic. ........... Doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians are supposed to be the superheroes of the pandemic. They are immortalized in graffiti, songs belted out from balcony windows and tributes erected from Times Square to the Eiffel Tower. But despite the accolades, many confide that the past months have left them feeling lost, alone, unable to sleep. They second-guess their decisions, experience panic attacks, worry constantly about their patients, their families and themselves, and feel tremendous anxiety about how and when this might end. ............. The unfathomable loss of more than 100,000 Americans within a matter of weeks — many in isolation, without family or friends — has inflicted a level of trauma few anticipated when they signed up for these jobs. ............... She quoted her as describing a scene “like Armageddon” and saying, “We can’t keep up.” ......... Ayoub said he was not surprised when a quarter of his classmates in the residency program at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai revealed in a survey they had thought about suicide. ......... “A lot of people were angry at the whole situation and the system,” he added. “How it all happened. How we weren’t prepared. The lack of support.” .......... Counselors seeing health-care workers describe symptoms of burnout, PTSD and “moral injury” — the effect of hundreds of decisions made each day on the fly and amid the chaos, creating conflict between deeply held beliefs and options considered inadequate or downright wrong. ........... struggled with helping her elderly patients sick with covid-19 decide whether to stay home and die surrounded by family — or go to the hospital where they would get treatment but still possibly die, in that case, almost certainly alone ............... In some medical centers, the ratio of deaths to discharges was as high as 9 to 1 among the critically ill on ventilators. ......... Nurses placed empty white shoes in front of the White House to protest lost colleagues who they contend became ill and died as a result of inadequate protective equipment. ..... Ten nurses were suspended at Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, Calif., after they refused to enter a coronavirus patient’s room without N95 masks. ............ colleagues lived in cars, stayed at hotels or sent family members to live with relatives to avoid infecting loved ones. ...... A study of 1,257 doctors and nurses in China during that country’s coronavirus peak found that half reported depression, 45 percent anxiety and 34 percent insomnia. Another, looking at 1,400 health-care workers in Italy and published in JAMA Network Open, found half showed signs of post-traumatic stress, a quarter depression and 20 percent anxiety. In both China and Italy, young women were most likely to be affected. ............ the mental, emotional and physical burdens borne by health-care workers have been overwhelming. Witnessing the pain and death of so many other human beings, Hinrichsen said, reminds you of your own suffering and pain and brings home the reality that you, too, will die. ................. “It’s something that is hard to take straight on,” he said. “Like looking at the sun. You know it’s there and glance at it. But you don’t stare at it for hours at a time, day after day. That’s what working during the virus has been like for some.” ............ H e heard about one funeral home where police found dozens of decomposing bodies in a trailer, and he was furious.......... “PTSD is no joke.” ......... Looking out his window one day, seeing blue skies and feeling the sun, he could think only of crowds at the park, less than six feet apart, respiratory secretions flying. “This weekend is gorgeous,” he said. “It’s going to be horrible.” ......... “Certain moments trigger something that makes me really sad,” Holsbeke said. “I can be at home and be totally fine, and at bedtime, all of a sudden, sobs and anxiety kick in.” ........ had been screening patients for the coronavirus when he found out he had become infected. About a week after his diagnosis, Plaza was so short of breath he had trouble finishing sentences. ......... In one particularly brutal 10-day period, Audrey Chun lost seven patients — some of whom she had treated for decades. As a doctor in the geriatrics department of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, she was used to death, but this was different. ........... “Everything was happening so quickly,” he said. “Everyone was dying so quickly. We had to go from one death to another and the next. I was imagining it happening to my family and being in a situation like that.” ......... He thought of the 50-something woman who had so many people who loved her but who died alone. ....... “In the back of my mind I kept thinking it’s all coming back — and probably worse than the first time.”
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