She and others have gotten through the surges on adrenaline and camaraderie, only to realize, once the ICUs are empty, that so too are they. “It’s like it takes a piece of you every time you walk in,” says Ashley Harlow, a Virginia-based nurse practitioner who left her ICU after watching her grandmother Nellie die there in December. The nation has avoided the most apocalyptic scenarios, such as ventilators running out by the thousands, but it’s still sleepwalked into repeated surges that have overrun the capacity of many hospitals, killed more than 762,000 people, and traumatized countless health-care workers. Since COVID-19 first pummeled the U.S., Americans have been told to flatten the curve lest hospitals be overwhelmed. In April, she texted her friends: “Nothing like feeling strongly suicidal at a job where you’re supposed to be keeping people alive.” Shortly after, she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and she left her job. ![]() She felt like a stranger to herself, a commodity to her hospital, and an outsider to her own relatives, who downplayed the pandemic despite everything she told them. She had given everything-to that patient, and to the stream of others who had died in the same room. Weeks later, when the same family called to ask if the staff had really done everything they could, “it was like being punched in the gut,” she told me. The senselessness of the death, and her guilt over her own resentment, messed her up. (Cassie Alexander is a pseudonym that she has used when writing a book about these experiences. I’m the only person keeping your loved one alive. When one of them said that a miracle might happen, Alexander found herself thinking, I am the miracle. Her hands cramped and blistered as the family screamed and prayed. Alexander squeezed the bag every two seconds for 40 minutes straight to give the family time to say goodbye. Their lungs were so ruined that only a hand-pumped ventilation bag could supply enough oxygen. Last December, at the height of the winter surge, she cared for a patient who had caught the coronavirus after being pressured into a Thanksgiving dinner. But when COVID-19 hit her Bay Area hospital, she witnessed “death on a scale I had never seen before.” ![]() As an intensive-care-unit nurse of 14 years, Alexander had seen plenty of “ Hellraiser stuff,” she told me. The moment that broke Cassie Alexander came nine months into the pandemic.
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