Stacey Finlay is the Northern Ireland representative on the BGS Nurses and AHPs Council. She is currently Honorary Lecturer (Older People) at Queen’s University Belfast School of Nursing and Midwifery.
Article originally published in AGENDA.
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic is now more than five years ago, but sometimes it is still all I can think about. I wanted to write this down and share it publicly so that others who still find themselves taken back to this time won’t feel so alone. As healthcare professionals, we worked through something remarkable and difficult and terrifying that took immense strength. Although we – well, many of us - got through it, it doesn’t mean we don’t have wounds.
As Taylor Swift says in her song Epiphany, written about the pandemic, there are some things you just can’t speak about. To this day there are things and memories and feelings from the pandemic that I have not even told my closest friends or family, because how do you talk about them, without upsetting the very people that love you, and that you love, the most?
There are lots of events, feelings and memories that I cannot stop ruminating about on days where the pandemic will not leave my mind. Some, strangely enough, didn’t feel big or significant at the time – but some did. Fear, anger and betrayal are also feelings that I am consumed with about that time. I remember feeling afraid for a long time, like I was living in some sort of purgatory. Every day leaving the house and going to work or even leaving the house to try and go grocery shopping, wondering if that day was going to be the day that I would get COVID-19. And if it was, would I die? If I died, who would tell my mother, the rest of my family and my friends? Would I become another of the smiling faces posted by Nursing Notes in tribute after I died, that mainstream media would not speak about? And if mainstream media ever did speak about it, they would say that I was a ‘hero’ who died in the line of duty, in order to make my death more palatable for the general public?
I wasn’t a hero. None of the colleagues I worked with or colleagues across the globe who died due to COVID-19 were heroes – we were all professionals, doing a job, who deserved to be protected and we were let down by slow and inadequate governmental responses, and personal protective equipment (PPE) recommendations that were inappropriate for the way that COVID-19 is transmitted. PPE recommendations that seemed to be based more upon cost and stock availability than science. PPE that was at times difficult to obtain, and when it was obtained, at times it was defective or out of date when it arrived. PPE that did not protect us.
Recommendations and guidance changed daily, sometimes multiple times a day – and we were left to implement recommendations and guidance that, at times, did not make sense in accordance with the developing science and emerging evidence base.
In isolation, I do not believe that I experienced anything particularly traumatic, certainly not in terms of what colleagues in other settings experienced, but I do have memories that I cannot shake. If I close my eyes, in a millisecond I can be back in the rooms where the events of the pandemic happened. Strangely enough, not all of them are directly related to COVID-19. The non-COVID related memories are related to the normal, or non-COVID, deaths and people that I cared for at the end of life who did not have the virus. Those who couldn’t have family with them. Those whose family members were at risk and had to make a choice between putting their own lives in danger to spend time with their loved one while they were dying or not put themselves at risk and leave their loved one with the professionals caring for them rather than be there themselves. Those who had to say goodbye to their dying loved ones for the last time over a phone call or a glitchy Zoom. Those who died alone waiting for their family members to be allowed in so that they would not be alone.
When it comes to my COVID-19 memories, in addition to the constant fear of my own death, I remember explaining to my team one morning how we all needed to complete Verification of Life Extinct training because lots of people were going to die. The patients we cared for were high risk due to their age, frailty and multimorbidity, so many were likely to die – in fact, so many were anticipated to die that there would not be enough doctors to verify death had occurred. I remember the look of fear in each of their faces and in their eyes, and I remember feeling the need to portray that I was strong and unafraid, despite being deeply afraid. I remember the day that a company-wide email came through sharing the news that one of the nurses who worked for our company had died due to COVID-19 and the feeling of how close it all now felt.
I remember the first person I ever saw who was dying from COVID-19. Gasping and rattling despite being on high flow oxygen with wide and fearful eyes, drowning on dry land. I remember they were the first person I actually saw die from COVID-19 and the first person for whom I verified that their death had occurred. I remember the strange feeling of placing my stethoscope on their chest and not hearing their heart beating or air moving through their lungs. Hearing only silence. I remember meeting their family member for the first time, and our first conversation including me introducing myself and breaking the news that their family member had died while they were trying to get there to spend their last moments with them. I vividly remember the nightmares that I had about their death too, where I was back in their warm room, in full PPE, placing my stethoscope on their chest and hearing silence - but when I looked at their face, I could still seem them gasping for air, drowning on dry land.
The one thing I cannot remember however is their name. I have felt guilty about that for a long time because I incorrectly thought not remembering their name meant that their death had not mattered to me. I felt guilty that I played a significant role on that day for that family, who will likely not have forgotten my name – and yet I forgot theirs. However, I have since realised that perhaps my inability to remember their name is due to the significance of that event, that day, that person to me, and perhaps this is my brain’s way of trying to protect me from feeling more trauma. Not remembering their name distances the memory of them being a full and rounded person and instead keeps them as a person that I only encountered for one day.
In addition to fear of upsetting the people I love and the people that love me most, the other reason these experiences, feelings and memories have been relegated to things you just can’t speak about, is because of some of the public discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic.
Seemingly almost every post on social media regarding COVID-19 is followed by comments from people who believe that the pandemic was a ‘scamdemic,’ was invented by the government to control the population or to make government donors money through contracts (as we have since found during the COVID-19 inquiry, this bit isn’t actually wholly inaccurate) or for ‘big pharma’ to make money through vaccines and treating COVID-19, and generally that none of it was true, none of it was real. The moral injury from seeing these comments invalidating my lived experience only adds to the trauma from living and working through the pandemic itself.
My lived experience was real. My memories are real. The fear was real. The trauma is real, and sometimes we need to try and speak about the things that you just can’t speak about.