I don’t think the average person knows just how bad it was.
callthesomnambulance on
And yet they still had to strike to get a half decent pay rise, and we’re still fobbing the nurses off with a 20 odd % real terms pay cut since 2010. It just seems incredibly ungrateful considering what we expected them to do every day for literally years….
OldGuto on
How the hell these people don’t have PTSD I don’t know.
YYNJ_ on
The fact that people genuinely believed masks and vaccines don’t work just shows you how far removed a good amount of the public are/were from the reality of this.
Tomoshaamoosh on
The first wave was such a horrible time. Half of my memories of it are incredibly vivid and half are hazy like my brain has tried to block them out.
The memory that haunts me most was when I was the only nurse on my ward looking after 15 patients with one HCA to help me. We were designated as an end-of-life ward at the time and I kept having to call the site nurse practitioner to come down and help me restock the syringe driver infusions for my patients when they were running out. I needed her to come as these are continuous infusions with controlled drugs in them (morphine, midazolam etc) and by law you need two nurses to check the stock level as they are removed from a locked cupboard to ensure they are not being diverted.
In the mid-afternoon the syringe driver of one, then two, then three patients in neighbouring beds all ran out. I kept bleeping and bleeping to get her to come down to check the drugs out with me but she wasn’t returning my calls. Too busy fighting other fires elsewhere. The poor patients were left without these medications to manage their pain and agitation, which are administered to help them pass peacefully for almost 2.5 hours.
As the drugs wore off the patients started moaning and groaning in pain and starting to thrash around in the bed. One of them tried to get out and scratched me and smacked my face shield square off my face when I went to try to stop him from getting up to prevent a fall. My mask fell off one ear at the same time and I found myself with no choice but to inhale with his gasping mouth a few feet from me as he screamed at me to get away. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes or the sound of his cries. This commotion only caused more distress to the other two patients who started wailing even harder. I’ll never forget the site or sounds of them either.
All three of them died overnight and their beds were filled by the next morning. The next afternoon another two patients died on my watch and the new admission sent from the acute assessment unit arrived dead. She had died while being pushed in the bed by the porters. That one probably hurt the most. My next shift had four deaths in one day.
I developed a drinking problem and put on about 16kg that year and the next. I’m down 15kg now and 443 days sober but fuck me was it hard to turn it around.
The biggest insult is that there’s some, many actually, who claim I was dossing about doing tiktok dances for six months and that I should be content with my claps.
LordLucian on
I wish I fell into a coma in 2019 and woke up just mow
i-am-a-passenger on
If they keep investigating the blowback from covid is going to be huge. Haven’t heard anything yet about the top down demands to not send any patients into hospital under any circumstances, or the orders to put curable patients on end of life plans. I have heard of a few doctors and nurses being stripped of their pins for following these orders though.
Puzzleheaded-Tie-740 on
> “We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky, where one of the nurses told me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.
>“[One hospital] said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed that they were putting patients in body bags, lifting them from the bed, putting them on the floor, and putting another patient in that bed straight away because there wasn’t time.
> “We went to another hospital where things got so bad, they were so short of resource, that they ran out of body bags, and they were instead issued with 9ft clear plastic sacks and cable ties. And those nurses talk about being really traumatised by that, because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away.”
> In one hospital, Fong said, “some of the nurses had chosen to wear adult diapers because there was literally no one to give them a toilet break and take over their nursing duties”.
myanusisbleeding101 on
And yet the tories profited from all this by giving away covid contracts to shell companies in the guise of helping and delaying the delivery of supplies to “make sure they did it right”, it can never be forgiven, they profited off the deaths and trauma they inflicted on the public.
9 Comments
I don’t think the average person knows just how bad it was.
And yet they still had to strike to get a half decent pay rise, and we’re still fobbing the nurses off with a 20 odd % real terms pay cut since 2010. It just seems incredibly ungrateful considering what we expected them to do every day for literally years….
How the hell these people don’t have PTSD I don’t know.
The fact that people genuinely believed masks and vaccines don’t work just shows you how far removed a good amount of the public are/were from the reality of this.
The first wave was such a horrible time. Half of my memories of it are incredibly vivid and half are hazy like my brain has tried to block them out.
The memory that haunts me most was when I was the only nurse on my ward looking after 15 patients with one HCA to help me. We were designated as an end-of-life ward at the time and I kept having to call the site nurse practitioner to come down and help me restock the syringe driver infusions for my patients when they were running out. I needed her to come as these are continuous infusions with controlled drugs in them (morphine, midazolam etc) and by law you need two nurses to check the stock level as they are removed from a locked cupboard to ensure they are not being diverted.
In the mid-afternoon the syringe driver of one, then two, then three patients in neighbouring beds all ran out. I kept bleeping and bleeping to get her to come down to check the drugs out with me but she wasn’t returning my calls. Too busy fighting other fires elsewhere. The poor patients were left without these medications to manage their pain and agitation, which are administered to help them pass peacefully for almost 2.5 hours.
As the drugs wore off the patients started moaning and groaning in pain and starting to thrash around in the bed. One of them tried to get out and scratched me and smacked my face shield square off my face when I went to try to stop him from getting up to prevent a fall. My mask fell off one ear at the same time and I found myself with no choice but to inhale with his gasping mouth a few feet from me as he screamed at me to get away. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes or the sound of his cries. This commotion only caused more distress to the other two patients who started wailing even harder. I’ll never forget the site or sounds of them either.
All three of them died overnight and their beds were filled by the next morning. The next afternoon another two patients died on my watch and the new admission sent from the acute assessment unit arrived dead. She had died while being pushed in the bed by the porters. That one probably hurt the most. My next shift had four deaths in one day.
I developed a drinking problem and put on about 16kg that year and the next. I’m down 15kg now and 443 days sober but fuck me was it hard to turn it around.
The biggest insult is that there’s some, many actually, who claim I was dossing about doing tiktok dances for six months and that I should be content with my claps.
I wish I fell into a coma in 2019 and woke up just mow
If they keep investigating the blowback from covid is going to be huge. Haven’t heard anything yet about the top down demands to not send any patients into hospital under any circumstances, or the orders to put curable patients on end of life plans. I have heard of a few doctors and nurses being stripped of their pins for following these orders though.
> “We had nurses talking about patients raining from the sky, where one of the nurses told me they just got tired of putting people in body bags.
>“[One hospital] said that sometimes they were so overwhelmed that they were putting patients in body bags, lifting them from the bed, putting them on the floor, and putting another patient in that bed straight away because there wasn’t time.
> “We went to another hospital where things got so bad, they were so short of resource, that they ran out of body bags, and they were instead issued with 9ft clear plastic sacks and cable ties. And those nurses talk about being really traumatised by that, because they had recurring nightmares about feeling like they were just throwing bodies away.”
> In one hospital, Fong said, “some of the nurses had chosen to wear adult diapers because there was literally no one to give them a toilet break and take over their nursing duties”.
And yet the tories profited from all this by giving away covid contracts to shell companies in the guise of helping and delaying the delivery of supplies to “make sure they did it right”, it can never be forgiven, they profited off the deaths and trauma they inflicted on the public.