An ICU Nurse Reflects on ‘Returning Home from COVID Island’

“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.”

[…]

2022-03-17T11:47:07-04:00March 17th, 2022|COVID-19, Nursing, nursing career, nursing stories|0 Comments
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Who Cares for the Nurses Who Care for You?

‘An epidemic of nonstop.’

According to Provision 5 of the American Nurses Association (ANA) Code of Ethics, “the nurse owes the same duties to self as to others, including the responsibility to promote health and safety, preserve wholeness of character and integrity, maintain competence, and continue personal and professional growth.” Yet all too often, nurses are viewed as heroes, and this heroization, while perhaps well-intentioned, may exacerbate a reality in which nurses put caring for others ahead of caring for themselves.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw a worsening of an issue that has long plagued the nursing profession: “an epidemic of nonstop” in which the lack of basic self-care such as bathroom and meal breaks has become the norm and nurses literally “work until they drop.” The many stressors associated with the COVID-19 pandemic further heightened the need for nurses to care for themselves.

Workplace benefits and financial protections vary widely for nurses.

Approximately three-quarters of all health care workers, including nearly 90% of nurses, are women. COVID-19 brought to light the gaps in benefits among these workers.

In order to support nurses whose ability to work had been affected by the pandemic by providing them with direct financial assistance through emergency grants, the American Nurses Foundation partnered with

2021-11-10T10:41:13-05:00November 10th, 2021|COVID-19, Nursing, nursing career, women's health|0 Comments
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The Essentials for Nurses About Recognition and Treatment of MIS-C

‘A massive systemic inflammatory response.’

While on the whole the United States is seeing a decline in COVID cases, this most recent wave of the Delta variant has seen an unprecedented number of children infected and hospitalized for COVID-19.

While children generally fare better than adults from the virus, infection may make them susceptible to a rare condition known as multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C).

This rare but serious condition was described by Shields and colleagues in our May issue as “a massive systemic inflammatory response that has physiologic correlations to Kawasaki disease, Kawasaki disease shock syndrome, toxic shock syndrome, macrophage activation syndrome, and cytokine release syndrome.”

The CDC reports that, as of October 4, the number of patients meeting the case definition for MIS-C was 5,217 (up from 4,000 reported in June) and the total number of deaths meeting the case definition was 46.

The CDC case definition includes the following:

2021-10-28T10:36:09-04:00October 20th, 2021|COVID-19, infectious diseases, Nursing|0 Comments
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Delta, Mu, and Others: What to Know About Covid Variants

Daily Trends in COVID-19 Cases in the U.S. Reported to CDC (9-21-21): red line shows 7-day moving average. Click image to enlarge.

According to the CDC, the delta variant now makes up more than 99% of COVID-19 cases across the U.S. Recently, though, the media has been drawing attention to the mu variant. Should we worry?

How serious are variants?

Viruses constantly change. Mutations might make a virus easier to spread or more virulent, change its clinical presentation, or alter its response to tests, vaccines, or treatment. Or there may be no observable change in its characteristics at all. Some variants simply fade away; others stick around, but can’t compete with more dominant variants and never really get a “foothold” in a particular population. At this time—and this is a pretty big caveat—the COVID-19 mu variant seems stuck in this last category, at least in the U.S.

What about mu?

Although the mu variant has been identified in more than 39 countries, including the U.S., there have been only about 2,000 cases here, mostly in California, Florida, Texas, and New York. The World Health Organization (WHO) calls mu a “variant of interest” […]

2021-09-14T14:36:42-04:00September 14th, 2021|COVID-19, infectious diseases, Nursing|1 Comment
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School Nurses During COVID-19: Still Holding the Line

Anything but the normal school year we’d hoped for.

The 2021-2022 school year is upon us and it is anything but the normal year many of us had hoped for. For some kids, it will be the first time going back into the classroom after 18 months at home. As a mom of two kids under 12 who cannot yet be vaccinated, it is a time of anxiety as I send my kids into school with a more contagious COVID-19 variant. Despite the mitigation efforts put in place, I wonder if it will be enough.

In parts of the country, cases are still skyrocketing and hundreds of kids have already had to quarantine or switch to remote learning. Some states have layers of mitigation in place in their schools, while in others, governors are fighting to keep schools from instituting mask mandates. And through this all, the person at the front line is the school nurse.

School nurses on the front lines as the rules keep changing.

In our August issue, AJN Reports highlights how school nursing has changed amid the current pandemic. Adding to the many other challenging tasks that school nurses already have is

2021-08-23T09:23:14-04:00August 23rd, 2021|COVID-19, school nurses|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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