'The patients are so sick. Oh my God. I’ve been a nurse for a really long time, and I’ve never seen so many people so sick in one space in my entire career.'
Providing emergent care to a patient in respiratory failure at Mount Sinai Brooklyn on Friday, March 27. Photo: Patrick Schnell, M.D. This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
For the most part, my staff tends to seem better after a week or ten days. Then, every once in a while, there’s that outlier. I have this young nurse who’s in her early 30s, who texted me about an hour ago, “I can’t breathe. I’m going to the emergency room.” It just seems like it’s different for everyone, which I think makes it so challenging. It’s the unknown that makes you so crazy.
We see so many atypical presentations. Everybody says, Oh, you have a fever. You have a cough. You have congestion. You know, you have shortness of breath. But some people don’t have that. They’ll just have one symptom. One patient came in complaining of back pain, which he had had for a long time, so it isn’t a new back pain. And eventually they did a CAT scan and a chest X-ray and found that he had pneumonia. And that’s what prompted them to test him for COVID.
The thing is that — and I know everybody would say this about their field — nurses are different. The doctor comes in for 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, spends that time with your patient and leaves. But the nurses are there for 11.5 hours every day with that patient, with that family — they know their fears, they know the intimate details of their health, their personal lives. You’re taking people back and forth to the bathroom.
Patients line up on stretchers on both sides of ER corridors awaiting medical care and disposition. Photo: Patrick Schnell, M.D. A refrigerated truck is parked outside to accommodate the deceased. Photo: Patrick Schnell, M.D. Nurses are generally a very warm group, and now you can’t even give somebody a hug if they’re afraid. You’ve got to keep six feet. And you’ve got so many other things to do. We’re losing the human side because we’re trying to save the life.
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