“It’s hard to remember my job before all this began,” writes critical care nurse Deirdre McNally in this month’s Reflections essay, “Returning Home from COVID Island.” As the pandemic abates, she finds herself searching for a coherent narrative to understand what she’s experienced. But it’s not so simple. Memories of patients, moments, stray images from many months before slip unbidden into her head.

The difficulty of making sense of the past two years.

What does it mean to ‘make meaning’ from such an all-consuming experience? Maybe the answer will come with time. For now, she suggests, there are too many events, too many emotions and impressions to really absorb as things slowly resume a semblance of greater normalcy:

“For many health care providers,” she writes, “I think this is a protective mechanism meant to shield us from experiences too difficult to absorb.”

Deepening sense of teamwork.

Meanwhile, time moves on. And McNally does in fact find that she’s learned a great deal about nursing and has also grown closer to her colleagues in the past years. 

“We are better listeners, teammates, and friends. We learned to lean on each other, especially across the hierarchy of titles that so often divides us.”

This is a thoughtful essay that is likely to speak to nurses who find themselves with a similar difficult-to-formulate question about what they’ve been through, how it’s changed them, and what it all really means in the end.