The virus is evolving. It has become more infectious and more difficult to contain, in fact even more difficult to identify. The hospitals are beginning to feel the demand for isolation units once again. The emergency room slowly becoming more congested, with a lot of backlog patients needing admission but no available rooms. Correction - there are available rooms, but we lack nurses who can attend to these patients. And yet everyday, we see the numbers rising.
In the early part of this epidemic, as someone who works in the healthcare, I was afraid - all this is new to me and I see my mentors and the people I look up to struggling for the appropriate management to keep patients alive. That fear was somewhat pacified as we started to see more recoveries, as we close down some covid units and as we slowly transition to the new normal.
As we see patients everyday, we started to see the complications of the lock down - people whose health deteriorated because they were unable to see their doctors during the quarantine. And despite trying to go back to the new norm, we were never complacent. We were always on our toes, always having that COVID-19 possibility in all the patients that we see.
But then we now see patients who are asymptomatic but testing positive for COVID-19. We see weird presentations - from what seemed to be rhabdomyolysis to what we know as uremia yet testing positive for the virus.
Being in the front line, we also begin to question ourselves - were we really complacent? Did we really not assess the patient properly? Was there something else that we could have done to make sure that there were less people exposed?
And the fear builds up once again. The anxiety that was suppressed by not thinking too much, resurfaces. The scare of contracting the virus, more so transmitting it to our loved ones and the people who wait for us in our homes, is back. And the fatigue, that feeling of exhaustion of fighting and trying to win against something every. single. day. is very evident in the eyes of the people we work with.
This is far from winning, far from over. In fact, it all feels like we are back to square one.
In the early part of this epidemic, as someone who works in the healthcare, I was afraid - all this is new to me and I see my mentors and the people I look up to struggling for the appropriate management to keep patients alive. That fear was somewhat pacified as we started to see more recoveries, as we close down some covid units and as we slowly transition to the new normal.
As we see patients everyday, we started to see the complications of the lock down - people whose health deteriorated because they were unable to see their doctors during the quarantine. And despite trying to go back to the new norm, we were never complacent. We were always on our toes, always having that COVID-19 possibility in all the patients that we see.
But then we now see patients who are asymptomatic but testing positive for COVID-19. We see weird presentations - from what seemed to be rhabdomyolysis to what we know as uremia yet testing positive for the virus.
Being in the front line, we also begin to question ourselves - were we really complacent? Did we really not assess the patient properly? Was there something else that we could have done to make sure that there were less people exposed?
And the fear builds up once again. The anxiety that was suppressed by not thinking too much, resurfaces. The scare of contracting the virus, more so transmitting it to our loved ones and the people who wait for us in our homes, is back. And the fatigue, that feeling of exhaustion of fighting and trying to win against something every. single. day. is very evident in the eyes of the people we work with.
This is far from winning, far from over. In fact, it all feels like we are back to square one.
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