Nightmares and tears: Covid-19 takes a heavy toll on healthcare workers in Colorado

“Rates in our long-term care facilities have exploded everywhere, deaths have skyrocketed. It’s a different volume now and unfortunately a lot worse” than at the start of the pandemic, Tapia said.

Before the pandemic, Allison Boerner, a nurse in charge in an emergency room at a hospital in Parker, metro Denver, said her job had never made her lose sleep. Now she regularly has nightmares or flashbacks, she says.

“When I close my eyes at night, I see my patients die or the members of my family that I had to tell, participate in telling that their loved one is no longer there,” Boerner said. “This is what I see the most.”

“I have no explanation except that it’s like living a nightmare,” she said, telling relatives that their loved ones are dead and she cannot comfort them physically.

Boerner said she also didn’t cry much at work – before the pandemic.

“You hold onto that. You want to stay tough on the family and stoic,” Boerner said. “And there have been a lot of tears shed in the emergency rooms during Covid.”

“Because we treat this dying person like our dying loved one, because they don’t have anyone else, and they need this grace, and they need this human touch, and they need someone. ‘one to be there when she takes her last breath,’ she said.

The experiences will always be with her, Boerner said.

“Death is something that no one wants to have to face, but we all have to face it. It is something that is inevitable. And not letting the family be with a loved one who dies is something you do. never forget, “she told me.

At the start of the pandemic, people were afraid to go to the emergency room because of the virus. Now the number of patients his emergency department sees is “overwhelming,” Boerner said, and nurses are working overtime.

“Now the fear is gone, and everyone’s got Covid, and everyone’s coming to the emergency room besides all the other patients we see, and it’s flooding the system,” she says.

A doctor who treats the elderly and works as a palliative care physician, Tapia said death was not new to her, and she sees her job as ensuring that “people have the best quality of life, according to their values ​​and goals they can toward this end transition. “

But Covid-19 has made that nearly impossible, because what’s most important at the end of life is being with loved ones, she said.

“Their families can’t visit, or they can do it through a screen, or they can get a compassionate visit covered in PP,” or personal protective equipment, Tapia said. “It’s just devastating, the loneliness.”

And that is after patients have endured long periods of not seeing family and friends due to limited visits.

“We had to shut down and make sure that people couldn’t visit to protect them, but I don’t know if that protected them, because of the loneliness and isolation that it caused”, she said. declared.

“And then because of the mismanagement of this whole pandemic, they still get it, you know? So it’s like, okay, so you’re still dying of Covid, and you couldn’t see your relatives. What was the point of all this? “

It is clear that the crisis is weighing heavily on healthcare workers and their colleagues.

Boerner cries as she talks about the toll the pandemic is taking on the people she works with.

“You know, we lean on each other,” Boerner said. “The holidays have been tough for a lot of us. We don’t see our families; we do everything we can to keep the public safe. And so, it was extremely frustrating for us when people didn’t. it.”

Tapia said she absolutely sees the depression increasing in her colleagues.

“Depression, anxiety, you know, hopelessness, fatigue, burnout,” she says.

Tapia said she was getting away with having more therapy sessions, which have increased “astronomically due to Covid”, medication and a new puppy.

“Covid is really the reason I take antidepressants, and they’ve really, really helped,” she said.

A number of frontline workers have quit, according to Tapia.

“The emotional toll is enormous for all frontline workers,” she said.

“So I think we’re going to get to a point where, in particular, nurses, this country won’t have them, you know, the staffing of the care that we need is going to be a huge problem.”

For those who remain, the problems will not be resolved when the crisis ends, she said.

“I think a lot of people are really trying to take one step at a time, to do the next right thing,” she said. “And I think there will be a huge toll when things calm down and people can really figure out what happened to them.”