[dirk digler]

This is article is personal for me and this nurse quoted in this article works with my daughter. My daughter is struggling with PTSD from the first wave with all the death she had to deal with but is doing it all again and is preparing for the worst that is starting.

I know alot of people have covid fatigue and see these death numbers and have become numb to it. So I think it is time for the media to embed with hospitals and show what it is like to suffer and die with covid much like what they do when we go to war. I think people would instantly change their behavior.

Anyway, keep all of our front line health care workers in your thoughts as they are going to need major mental health care once this is all done with.

https://www.kansascity.com/news/coro...ainstage_card3

‘With this, I’ve lost count:’ As COVID surges in KC, health workers, families struggle

Nathan Jones wishes people could witness what he’s seen: Patients who arrive struggling to breathe. Patients sedated and intubated, relying on a machine to push oxygen into their inflamed lungs.

“It used to be you could count or remember the people that you’ve coded (lost), and their story,” said Jones, 31, a nurse who worked at AdventHealth Shawnee Mission and will be starting at Saint Luke’s.

“With this, I’ve lost count.”

COVID-19 killed eight people, on average, every day in metropolitan Kansas City last week. Two days in a row, more than 1,000 new cases were reported, with 5,100 total added last week. The University of Kansas Health System was hit with a record number of virus patients. Physicians voiced their concerns to elected officials during a call Friday.

The third wave appears to be the worst yet. Infection is crossing all categories of age and health. Last weekend, a 13-year-old Missouri boy died of complications from the coronavirus. Other young people are suffering strokes. Patients who contracted the virus months ago still can’t breathe without supplemental oxygen.

Jones is astounded that countless Kansas Citians continue to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic or are tired of taking the steps necessary to flatten the curve. Local elected officials have failed to lead, he said.

Frontline workers

One of the most difficult parts for Jones, the ICU nurse, is post-mortem care, which requires wrapping the deceased’s head with gauze to contain any virus particles.

“Every time we do it — it takes two people — one of us always mentions how much we hate it,” he said.

Some health care employees that Jones knows have relied on therapy, others have started taking antidepressants. Some have burned out, mentally and physically, and left the field.

“It comes in waves. If you have a good week where you don’t have a lot of passing or you get a break from COVID, you start to feel a little bit more like yourself,” he said. “If you have a week of COVID and you don’t have success and you get a bunch of deaths, you definitely start to feel it.”

Zoe Schmidt, a nurse at Research Medical Center, said she feels hopeless as cases rise, seemingly unabated.

She’s disappointed in her public officials, who have failed to institute statewide mask mandates or local lock downs as the situation worsens. And in her hospital’s administrators, who she feels aren’t providing adequate protection or support to staff.

With all that, she said, “there’s no end in sight.”

“Everything keeps rising and we’re losing staff and we’re already so understaffed and we’re already really burnt out and tired and scared and we keep getting sick,” Schmidt, 24, said.

She said more than 200 nurses have quit at Research since April. Many of those who remain are seeking therapy or counseling because of the trauma they’ve witnessed and endured.

Many, she said, have contracted the virus themselves and are scared of bringing it home to their friends and family.

In April, a nurse at Research Medical center died after contracting the virus. Schmidt said she’s worried there will be more.

“A lot of us are dealing with a strong emotional impact when we don’t really have as much of as support system as we’re used to,” she said.

COVID-19 patients, she said, aren’t able to see their family so hospital workers are their main source of support. This is more difficult, Schmidt said, because they don’t know enough about the virus to reassure patients that it will be okay.

She’s seen young people have strokes after contracting the virus and patients months after catching the virus who still need oxygen. She can’t tell these patients whether it will ever get better.

“It’s scary for them, and it’s scary for us,” she said.

“There are stories that haunt us all but we can’t talk about them publicly,” she said. “People of all backgrounds and races and ages are getting really sick and dying.”