Notwithstanding the new norm created by this Covid-19 pandemic, it is not a hidden secret that the nursing community is also facing some long-understood truths, that is nurses are underpaid, undervalued, and sometimes treated as expendable. But this doesn’t remove the nurse’s will to help treat their patients the best they can.
Here’s a story of two brave nurses from Fort Worth who traveled all the way to New York to work in the frontline of the Covid-19 crisis.
The two Fort Worth-based nurse anesthetists had agreed to work on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis – Quasnitschka hadn’t actually decided to go until the day before they boarded a plane, but she couldn’t bear the thought of her life partner confronting this unknown menace alone.
Staffers filed into the room dressed in layers of masks and other protective gear. As they shed their coverings, Nelson and Quasnitschka said they could see the deep trenches dug into the faces of their new co-workers, who had been wearing masks for hours on end. Their eyes, the two nurses said, were glossy from lack of sleep and shock.
“They’d been awake all night seeing people die,” Nelson said. “It can’t be exaggerated how much death was happening there.”
Every 20 minutes, the nurses said, someone was found dead, needing to be intubated, or requiring CPR. The entire hospital was converted into an intensive care unit. Ventilators dotted the landscape as hospital staff hurried from room to room to treat patients whose lives, in most cases, were already lost. Nurses and doctors were inventing treatments on the fly, experimenting in real-time in the faint hope that some new combination of drugs or different tact would save a patient.
Family members of the sick weren’t allowed in the hospital to protect them from contracting the virus. Sick people who had checked in just a couple of days or even hours prior were dying alone and scared – in most cases after having watched their roommates foreshadow their gruesome fate. Three industrial refrigerator trucks remained parked outside of the hospital, so staff would have somewhere to store the dead.
Read the full story here.
If you are a Nurse in Fort Worth who is currently facing any disciplinary issues before the Texas Board of Nursing, please contact Fort Worth nurse attorney Yong J. An, call or text at 832 428 5679 or anlawfirm@gmail.com. Mr. An has represented over 100 nurses before the Texas Board of Nursing since 2006.