If you don’t personally know a healthcare worker, you may not know how being one or living with one affects your every day life -whether there is a pandemic or not. Under normal circumstances, our normal routines can be disruptive to the ones around us. It is hard not to take our work home with us and contemplate all the what if’s and patient’s whose lives and even deaths have deeply impacted us. Healthcare workers give up 12+ hours of their day or night, holidays with their families, restful sleep, regular breaks for food or the bathroom. Hospitals don’t close if it snows. Someone needs to be on call if there is an overnight emergency. It is no different in a global pandemic. Healthcare workers are either working exceedingly longer and more shifts, or are not able to work at all. It is a tough time to be a healer, a carer of people, a practitioner of science and medicine. Especially when the people we’re trying to protect are becoming restless and try to refute the science and medicine we live and breathe.
Every month (if I remember, consistent blogging can be difficult) I will share the reasons people have been nominating healthcare workers, so that you can see how their loved ones truly value the work that they do in a post called “Kind Words”. So without further ado, here are some Kind Words.
[My niece] is a doctor in Boston serving in the Hospital and in a clinic during this stressful time. She is a mom to 2 amazing children and she is married to my nephew. They are all at risk as she continues to serve faithfully in this important way
-D.C.
My mom has been a nurse for over 40 years. A few weeks ago she volunteered to work in the ER for the first time ever to help fight the COVID pandemic while her own unit was closed. Her work ethic has always been something that I have aspired to. I am the nurse I am today because of her.
-K.P.
[My friend] is an amazing nurse and is working the front lines on a Covid unit! She and I used to work together right after college and have since moved to different parts of the country, but I know she gives her all every day and is an excellent nurse. She and her co workers deserve to be taken care of during this stressful time.
-J.D.
[My cousin] is a hard working NP in the heart of the Covid outbreak in NYC. She gives her all and [was] quarantined at home due to exposure at work. Since then, she has gone back to working full time on a Covid Unit. [She] deserves a small thank you for all she does.
-J.D.