REPRIEVE #1

I’ve been doing some things for myself while home, most of which are probably unhealthy. I spent the first three days at home in my pajamas living on cake and Easter candy. I usually bring my five-year-old daughter a small present of some kind when I travel for extended periods of time, so this time I brought a strawberry shortcake from a local bakery in NYC for her, but I ended up eating most of it myself. I got home in time for Easter, one of my daughter’s favorite holidays, so we had fun with egg hunts. I’ve had the urge to go out running a few times, but it’s been too cold here, so I’ve done very little exercise other than some light stretching and some very short bike rides.

During the reprieve, I got an email from the university I teach at part-time. They were seeking medical staff to volunteer to staff the tent hospital that’s being set up in anticipation of a surge in Milwaukee. Funnily enough, the tent will be open almost exactly two weeks after the spring election happened. Our state governor tried to cancel in-person voting in favor of vastly expanding absentee voting, but the state supreme court forced the election to be held anyway. The election took place and, I extrapolate based on the tent hospital opening two weeks later, they are expecting a major increase in cases due to the breach in social distancing by voters. I contacted the group that is setting the facility up and had a conference call with them about my experiences running the tent hospital in NYC, which hopefully gave them useful information. I also offered to give them access to a free, open-access COVID-19 education module I’ve been helping develop to prepare nurses and paramedics for dealing with COVID-19 patients, which they were happy to accept. The course should be out in several days; the portion I wrote is going through an expedited peer review before it’s published.

I’m not personally interested in volunteering in the tent. I certainly have no intention of working without fair compensation in an area that would put myself and my family at risk for contracting the disease, even if our actual risks for complications are very low. A huge segment of the nursing profession as a whole has this bizarre martyrdom complex, treating their professional work strictly as a duty regardless of personal risk or visible neglect by their employers to mitigate that risk. I would like to postulate that this is a faulty (if noble-appearing) viewpoint that places ourselves and our patients at risk with no benefit except to healthcare administrators. I’ve seen that postulation start to play out, particularly in facilities locally that refuse to provide adequate protective equipment for their nurses working with known COVID patients, despite having the equipment available. Some facilities are even disciplining their staff for using the correct protection based on evidence, and I hear some nurses buying into and voicing the rhetoric that it’s their “duty” or “what they signed up for” to take unnecessary risks.