I Work in Healthcare During a Pandemic, and it’s Really Impacting My Writing.
When all of this is over, I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same.
Since around the beginning of March, when the medical director of the Nursing Home where I work warned the administrators that it was a matter of when, not if the coronavirus reached the facility and my residents, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that the building is a ticking time bomb.
Well yesterday, the bomb went off.
Our first resident was diagnosed with COVID-19, and the results came back on her birthday.
There really is no amount of mental preparation that can get you ready for the moment when the inevitable finally hits. Instantaneously, aside from overwhelming fear the feelings of being dirty, dangerous, expendable, and above all, guilt washed over me with such ferocity I knew my knees would have buckled if I stood when my boss told me the news. The building has been closed to all visitors indefinitely since March 13th, two weeks before the first reported case even came to the county. Every day since even a few days before visitors were banned, all workers have been screened at the door for symptoms. One of us employees, tasked with the responsibility of keeping these residents as safe and healthy as possible, had been asymptomatic and unwittingly brought in this disease. And we won’t know for another three days just how widely it’s spread. All residents in the entire facility have now been tested, and all staff are in the process of being tested as well. I was tested yesterday, and it will be a long time before I forget the painfully uncomfortable, invasive nature of that test.
Long before the virus reached the building I’ve noticed the impact this surreal, uncertain period in history is having on my mental health and my writing as a result.
For weeks now, I’ve begun to notice my inability to focus on or even remotely enjoy anything. I’ve felt with each passing day the slow slipping away of the drive, determination, and excitement writing has brought to me since I was six years old. But that should come as no surprise when I feel like a shell of my former self. There are moments where I will catch myself just sitting on the couch, watching…
