A Bay Area nurse is waking up in her own bed this morning after spending a couple of sobering weeks volunteering on the virus frontline at a hard hit New York hospital.
When UCSF nurse Nicole Bried showed up at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, 80% of the patients were COVID-19 positive. She says she was shocked when she saw just how severe their illnesses were.
“Their respiratory rate, how fast they were breathing - a lot of them were sweating, you could see how tired they were. It was just, going into every room and a lot of them can’t speak to you, a lot of them were almost unconscious from illness,” says Bried. “It seemed like every patient was having such a hard time… I look at them, I see a loved one, you know? And I’m like wow I can’t imagine this being me or my loved ones and it’s scary.”
Every one of her patients was suffering from the virus, and staff lacked the personal protective equipment they need. “We wore the same thing in and out of all the rooms," says Bried. "We had lots of gloves but you get one gown, you get one mask, you get one face shield."
After weeks of 12-13 hour shifts, the emergency room numbers at the hospital began to flatten and that prompted a lot of worry from her New York colleagues, fearful that the leveling off would create a false sense of security and their hard work would be undone.
“They’re frightened here,” says Bried. “These nurses are like ‘oh man, we’ve just been working everyday and to just have everyone go back out’ - the only reason why it’s stopping is because it’s quiet here. It’s eerie. You drive around New York, there’s no traffic, there’s no one on trains. It’s because of that. If everyone was out and about it would just go crazy again.”
With the weather warming up, nurses on both coasts worry that people with cabin fever will be tempted to leave their homes. “If we all go out and we all go back to normal, it’s going to end up like New York,” says Bried, who does not want to see the same kind of suffering here in California.
She feels badly about leaving the hot zone where so many people are still in need of care.
“I have mixed emotions about going home. I feel like the number’s going down but it’s definitely been humbling and it’s an honor to be out here,” she says. “It’s going to be weird to be sitting.”
Sitting in a 14 day self-quarantine at home, where she says everyone else should be.
