Two Cape Town Nurses Describe Their Hell

(Photo of actual Covid-19 patient ter illustration. Not taken by any of the nurses in this article. Meme'd by the author.)

A South African woman currently residing in the Middle East, Alida Stapelberg, posted two accounts from nurses about their daily lives in hospitals on Facebook. (She didn't provide their names, unfortunately, and one may be her own experience with her being in the medical field.) Both letters are so chilling that I had to copy and paste it here below.

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To all the South Africans that are living in a bubble...COVID-19 can pop that bubble very quickly.

Let me bring you up to speed with a quick tour of a hospital right now.

Let's start at the ambulance deck where there are patients on stretchers and wheelchairs awfully short of breath, waiting...endlessly waiting for a bed...whilst their oxygen tank runs dry.

Some of them will die there.

Let's peek into the trauma emergency room: the stench of blood, sweat and ALCOHOL hit you like an overloaded truck. It's overflowing with physically broken people...the mass majority of whom are there due to ALCOHOL.

It is the festive season after all.

Ok let's go see how the medical emergency room is doing...patients on stretchers EVERYWHERE because wards have been converted to COVID beds. Guess it's just really bad timing to have a heart attack or stroke during a pandemic. You'll also spot the usual culprits; those that stopped taking their meds, those that binged on ALCOHOL, the parasuicide patients.

All rather poor timing.

Off we go to the surgical ICU, except now besides the huge trauma load December always brings, they now have to house ALL the medical ICU admissions too, because the medical ICU is now purely for COVID-19 patients...the waiting list is looooong.

Guess some patients might die in the meantime.

Now to the COVID wards...there's a good few of them, despite doctors and nurses being stretched so thin you can barely scrape them off the floor they're on because they are so emotionally and physically broken. No beds there either with a 3 page waiting list of patients. Some of them look ok, hopefully for discharge or step down soon.

 Some of them are slowly suffocating to death and there's nothing that can be done for them. The fear in their eyes is palpable. No family to comfort them during their dying breaths.

Boy do I wish I was exaggerating.

Final stop: Covid high care and ICU. FULL FULL FULL. As most of you by now should know, intubated covid patients have a dismal survival rate, no matter how hard the ICU staff works, how much of their souls they put into each and every patient, there's a 90% chance they will lose the patient.

It's time to wake up to the harsh reality that COVID-19 doesn't discriminate and that it is literally everyone's responsibility to help keep each other alive.

At least avoid big gatherings, wear a mask and sanitize.

And here's the second part, from an unknown nurse:

A Cape Town nurse posted:

I feel like it’s my responsibility to say something.

When I look outside from my home, everything looks calm and ‘normal’.

People are walking and laughing in the streets. Shops are buzzing with frantic Christmas shopping.

There’s a constant pulling towards “how things were”, especially during this season of togetherness.

If I didn’t work in the environment I am in, I would also have a growing mindset of “covid is over” “covid was a giant conspiracy”, and I would be joining in on the tug rope pull towards normal.

This is why I have this feeling of responsibility to say something.

Because unless you work in healthcare you won’t know.

A few minutes drive from the comfort of looking out my window is a consuming hell where I have to clock in and pretend to survive for the duration of my shift.

I arrive at work and I am assaulted with an overflowing ICU. There’s no staff, no beds, and definitely no ‘normal’.

I’m assigned a covid ventilated patient and 3 covid patients on high flow oxygen. This nurse to patient ratio is dangerous and I am scared.

I’m scared I am going to miss something that leads to their deterioration and possible death.

I am scared I am going to go to jail for a medical error.

I am scared for my mental health.

The phone rings. Constantly.

No visitors are allowed in hospital so I am the family’s eyes and ears.

Some of the families think that we are not doing enough, others are grateful.

The phone rings again.

Casualty and the wards looking for ICU beds.

My fingers are constantly doing maths equations.

How many ventilators are left, how may high flow machines are left, how many beds do we have, how many staff members do we have?

The maths equations have become easier now, because the answer has become the same for all: zero.

Zero beds available, zero high flow machines available, zero ventilators available, zero staff available.

Zero.

Zero whether the patient needing the bed is young, old, rich, poor, with medical aid or without medical aid.

The wards are scary. No one is connected to a monitor so there’s no early warning of deterioration. The nurses are running between patients with a monitor to check their oxygen levels. Some of the patients in the wards need high flow and ventilators, but we can’t help them.

We turn their oxygen flow the highest it can go and hope. We hold back the fear and tears in our own eyes to not show the patients how dire they are.

Casualty is scary. The ambulances keep pulling up with more and more patients needing oxygen even though the hospital is on divert.

“There’s no where else for them to go.”

Other emergencies still exist. Car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, diabetic emergencies, surgical emergencies etc.

Where do they go?

I go home and cry. I cry because I feel guilty that I am at home resting when the hospital needs help. I cry because I am overwhelmed and exhausted. I cry for all the lives we lost. I cry because everything is out of my control. My instinct to help and save lives is cancelled out by the limited resources and it kills me.

Your healthcare workers are either dead or tired. No new healthcare workers have arrived as reinforcements or replacements or relievers. It’s still us. The same ones who have been fighting since March.

We need you to please help us. Please be responsible.

It may look normal outside, but it is not. It really is not.

Please look after yourself and your loved ones.