re: When Health Workers say they are Exhausted and Overwhelmed...

We work 7 x 12 for 120 days straight every year mid Sept - mid Jan. No Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Years. Welcome to the fricking club, I say.

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Lay the frick off the health care workers. There are code blues going off in hospitals all the time that require chest compressions off/on for thirty minutes straight. shite is exhausting. Not to mention the dread you get of getting to know these patients and see many of them crash and die.

I just really think it's a bad look to start shitting on COVID nurses when all you are doing is sitting from home posting on Tigerdroppings.

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I thought this was the norm with nurses.

Sounds like you’re saying the job is typically cake, but since March they’ve actually had to take care of people and it sucks.

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My MIL is a regional nursing director in DFW who coordinates nurse schedules and balances nurse staffing needs among several large hospitals . You are full of shite.

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If any of that is remotely true, then she should have no problems explaining the true nature of their problems. They purposely understaffed themselves at the onset as there was only a handful of hotspots and the hospitals were never in danger of being overwhelmed, remember “flatten the curve”. As a result they gutted & furloughed all of their valuable employees(lLPN’s, RN’s, etc.) under the guise of budgetary cuts. As a result, now they’re paying 5x’s the amount for traveling nurses or utilizing temp agencies to cover their staffing shortages. So they’re bitching about issues that they brought upon themselves. Just like any other business when you have mismanagement at the top & administrators and bureaucrats are making healthcare decisions as opposed to actual healthcare professionals everyone suffers, particularly staff & patients.

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after watching patients die at an astounding rate, after having to explain to a family that Grandma or Grandpa or their diabetic father or mother will not survive due to the respiratory implications of Covid, after having no where to put an ailing patient but in a hallway, recall what some have said on this board. Karma can be painful...

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Holy dramatization Batman

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I thought this was the norm with nurses.

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Having 8-10 code blues go off on a single unit per shift is not the "norm." If it was, there would be an institutional review to find out why exactly that many people are dying at that rate.

Codes suck and I hear them go off allll day. They are mentally and physically exhausting. People are dying at a higher rate than in the summer. And most codes are run by smaller groups since the amount of help is confined to the COVID unit.

It's just not a good to look to shite on them when they are doing a lot of honest, hard work that requires a great deal of skill when you are likely on your arse commenting on TigerDroppings from home.

I just remind them about their tick tock videos when they complain and tell them welcome to the big boy accounting world of more than 40 a week

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The irony of this dude working a corporate job from home having enough time to post on Tigerdroppings..

Lay the frick off the health care workers. There are code blues going off in hospitals all the time that require chest compressions off/on for thirty minutes straight. shite is exhausting. Not to mention the dread you get of getting to know these patients and see many of them crash and die.

I just really think it's a bad look to start shitting on COVID nurses when all you are doing is sitting from home posting on Tigerdroppings.

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If this is a problem for them, they need to find another line of work. Seriously.

Those asking what I do for a living?? Not relevant as I don’t complain about it.

I’m an RN taking care of Covid patients in the ICU.
I was in Houston but left to come back to Louisiana.the stress is that in the middle of the crisis we were being asked to work more. Yes you are only required to work 3 12 hr shifts. Normal nurse patient ratio is one Rn to 2 critical patients. It has been proven that in the ICU this is optimal for best patient outcome. Being understaffed and taking 3-4 patients and having to work more than 36 hrs a week sometimes 60 hrs a week. Of course, you can just work your 36 but if everyone did that then you were even more understaffed. Everyone pitched in as best they could because that was the gig and it always has been the gig.. so initially it was just doing what we always did. So increased workload
The second, at least for me, is that when the patient got sick enough to be in the ICU, they were really really sick.. you work your arse off, like we always do, but they don’t get better. Usually, I mean historically, I help patients get better. Yes some don’t make it. But many/most of my Covid patients aren’t making it. So it’s hard to communicate the frustration of working so hard with the frustration of knowing that it probably won’t be successful. And I’m used to doing my job well and being successful. And the flow of work has changed because the illness is so virulent and scary making it harder to do in odd ways I don’t really feel like going into. So, in a sense, we are told I know you’ve always done it that way and it has always worked but do it differently wth several more steps that make it harder.
We don’t know what we are doing. Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work. Zithromax, an antibiotic, was to treat co infections. Doesn’t treat a virus. The MD’s were ordering vitamin C and stuff like that. While it may help in some way, if you hanging onto vitamins as the magic cure, you are screwed. And yet, it’s about all we had. We were treating symptoms but no cure and not much hope of patients getting better. Now it has gotten slightly better. Slightly better understanding of what helps but still no ironclad treatments that cure.
I’ll make it clear I’m no fricking hero. That crap pisses me off. I do my job and I get paid. A church group was standing outside giving us all a standing ovation while we walked from our cars to the hospital door, weird feeling. So things are weird.
So I work more. Fine. Working hard doesn’t bother me. Working more? 5-6 days a week is fine but you can only do that so long or you break down, maybe make mistakes. And then you won’t be successful in the way you Have always been successful. No hope of actually helping your patients. Pretty hopeless in fact.
So there, TLDR.
Yes. People recover. Or have no symptoms. But many get very sick and die. Those are My patients. Ones who do recover have lingering issues which are still being discovered.
But to hearing people say it’s fake. Just pisses me off. The selfish way some think about this show just how short sighted some people are. At what point do you take it seriously?
500,000, a million dead? 5 million? By the time you get there it’s too late. Does it have to kill someone you love before you think it’s serious?
Hell I don’t know where I’m going with this. But someone asked the question.