- Insider recently spoke to a nurse working on the COVID-19 floor of a Phoenix-area hospital.
- They described the pressure to come into work while ill, as well as the burnout they feel after a year in the COVID-19 unit.
- This is their story, as told to writer Jamie Killin.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a nurse working on the COVID-19 floor of a Phoenix-area hospital. They asked to remain anonymous to protect their career, but their identity and claims have been verified by Insider. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I'm a second-year nurse at a Phoenix-area hospital, and I'm finishing my first year in the COVID-19 unit. Despite CDC guidelines advising COVID-positive individuals to quarantine for five days after a positive test, I'm seeing other nurses going back to work within just a few days. That means there are COVID-positive nurses taking care of COVID-positive patients.
It stinks because they're having to go take their medicine, then go give the patients their medicine when they feel like crap. It's hard to give good care to patients when you don't feel well yourself.
We just came out of one of the busiest surges we've had, too, with the Omicron variant affecting so many people. Delta was the busiest and most stressful time because we had our sickest patients, but now we're having to spread ourselves thinner taking care of more people.
Our new policy states that you can come back to work if you feel good and you've been fever-free for 24 hours
When you walk through the doors, there's a thermal temperature check on a camera to monitor if someone has a fever, but I don't know how accurate it is, because if there's a shift change you've got 20 to 30 people walking through the door at the same time. I've never seen the camera flag someone as having a fever.
As far as testing for COVID-19, it's all up to the employee. If you feel sick, you can go get tested if you want. But there's no requirement, so you could be COVID-positive and not know.
My sick colleagues are coming back to work at different times depending on their situation. I was able to get time off specifically for COVID-19 when I was sick, but others weren't given that option. Then, if they can't use their paid time off or don't know about the COVID-19 time off policy — like if one person is having a baby and they don't want to use up their PTO — they'll come back before day five. Otherwise, they're afraid they'll lose their time off and they can't be at home when their baby comes. Since the messaging around time off is so inconsistent, there's a lot of confusion.
Everyone is making different decisions based on what they've heard and their personal situations
Prior to working on the COVID-19 floor, I worked on the oncology floor. I was very scared to get an asymptomatic case of COVID-19, not know I had it, and give it to my cancer patients. I was always very anxious and getting tested to make sure I didn't have it before going to work.
I bought all my at-home tests myself because they weren't provided to us. Now that I work on the COVID-19 floor, they're still not provided to us on-site. We must make an appointment to get tested, and because the hospital I work at is such a large system, there are a lot of employees. That makes it hard to get an appointment when you first feel like you might be sick.
Even when you're ill, I feel like there's some shame in taking a sick day
When you walk in in the morning, and you see the assignment — if someone called off sick, they put that on the assignment for everyone to see. I don't know if it's on purpose or not, and I really hope it's not, but it's almost like a guilt trip.
It's been so stressful. Some people purely don't want to work in COVID-19 anymore, and it's sad. There's a lot of work, and you're putting yourself at risk of getting sick every time you go to work. But someone has to do it.
For some people, I think it's stress and anxiety. We call it "pre-shift anxiety," which is when you sit at home and think about all the terrible things that are going to happen when you go to work the next day. Some people just can't handle it anymore.
Now that I've come up on a year of working with COVID-19 patients, I'm burned out
I don't want to do it anymore. I'm going to continue just because I like my job and I like the people I work with, but if my colleagues weren't there, I would find a new job.
Adding to the stress is that there are still people who don't believe in COVID-19 and don't believe in evidence-based practice. They don't believe in science. They don't believe in medicine. We have a lot of families that come through demanding therapies that have been proven ineffective or dangerous to the patient. Or they don't want certain medicines we recommend.
I'm all for researching and making sure the medications we're giving are appropriate and have a positive response. I love that. I wish families would be more involved, or that patients would be more informed themselves. However, there are good sources and bad sources for this information, and some people aren't doing the proper research.
In most cases, people take the medications and do the therapies we recommend, and they get better and they leave. Then I see the people that don't follow evidence-based practice and don't follow the recommendations, and they don't leave. They don't go home.
It's really frustrating to me as someone who's zipped up countless body bags — all while working around other sick people myself.
