I first heard about the new “coronavirus” in January 2020. From what I could tell, it sounded like a regular virus, like the common cold. This made sense to me. I wasn’t in the least bit concerned.
After a few weeks, I realized the media had not stopped talking about it. I was getting pretty annoyed at this point, because the public always blows things like this out of proportion. “Great,” I thought, “a bunch of people will come to my ER complaining of this stupid virus. It’s like the flu. Get over it.”
It wasn’t until people I love started telling me how concerned they were, literally begging me to not just blow this off that I started getting concerned. My best friend was literally crying that she was worried about it—about us—because of all the research she had done. It was only then that I asked myself if maybe I should be taking it more seriously; after all, even doctors and nurses were dying.
I started doing some research of my own and found that this thing, now dubbed “COVID-19,” was similar to SARS and MERS–some scary viruses. This is when things changed for me. I understood at that point that we (as a collective) knew hardly anything about this new virus and didn’t have the slightest clue how it affected out bodies or even how to prevent it from spreading. We assumed it worked like the other viruses in the “corona” family, but we weren’t sure–we still aren’t really sure.
We started seeing patients come to the ER with dry coughs, fever, and general malaise. That’s all–just a simple dry cough. If someone had come to the ER with a dry cough last year, we would have mocked them for coming to an emergency room for something that was likely seasonal allergies.
But now, at this point, someone complaining of a dry cough got our full attention. They would get a face mask and were quickly whisked away to a private negative-pressure room. We got scared. We weren’t prepared. We weren’t knowledgable. We were fighting an unknown virus–a virus that we knew was killing young and healthy people.
As time went on, during March, the hospitals began taking it more seriously. They began thinking of ways to conserve personal protective equipment (called “PPE”) because they knew they didn’t have enough for what was likely to come.
They started instituting practices that would have gotten nurses fired just weeks before, like telling us to wear the same mask for the entire shift. Before, that would have been a major violation of infection control standards–leaving one patient’s room and entering the next with the same mask. But now, it was a necessity. Now, we had to preserve as much PPE as possible.
I like to think that this was the way the world was when HIV was first discovered. People were dying of an unfamiliar virus with no treatment and no clear understanding of what it does to the body and definitive way to stop it. Sure, they had an idea, but there was no research, no medications, and no protocols. It was new. And it was happening in front of their eyes. People were dying and they didn’t have control.
That’s where we are now. People are hoarding toilet paper because they want some sense of control. People are wearing masks out in public, even though we aren’t certain how much that will help. People are asked to stay home. School is cancelled, as are most public gatherings. People are losing their jobs. People are dying. People are scared.
And then there’s us: the medical professionals. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, respiratory therapists, pharmacists, lab technicians, etc. This website is dedicated to the stories we have to share.
We don’t want to stay home. This is the reason we went into the medical field. We want to fight.
