NSW COVID-19 crisis: Shocking & bloody symptom Sydney nurses reveal about virus
Fears for her mum, PPE welts and stark isolation: A Sydney nurse has revealed the physical and emotional burdens involved in being on the front line in the fight against a viral killer
NSW
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When COVID nurse Ashleigh Peters arrives home from work, the front door is always ajar, left open just for her.
This is not an old-fashioned, country style welcome to her western Sydney family home. It’s a planned safety measure so that the young nurse can walk straight inside to a shower without touching a single thing in the house before the taps.
After showering she puts her clothes straight into a washing machine which is itself cleaned after finishing the load. It is a military style operation so that the 25-year-old doesn’t risk infecting her own family.
Weighing heavily on the young nurse’s mind is the threat to her mum who works for an aged care facility.
Ms Peters can arrive home with red facial welts and a stiff and painful jaw from hours of wearing a suction-like mask and goggles designed to prevent the deadly virus jumping between the patients and our frontline defenders.
Then there is the emotional burden she carries from the great stress of caring for patients who are struggling to breathe and coughing up blood — as they did in the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago. Some patients have gone to ICU and never come out. Others have died in the COVID ward.
Ms Peters has worked the Westmead COVID ward since the pandemic began and has not been able to be close to her mum since March, despite living in the same house.
“That’s been one of the biggest difficulties, not being about to hang around or hang out with my mum,” she says. “Not just for her safety but for her work. It’s very challenging to make sure I’m doing the right thing to make sure we do have that distance, always.”
Her family deals with the challenges with humour. If they see someone getting too close they scream out “social distancing laws” and everyone backs off.
SAFETY FIRST
Just one year into her nursing career, Ms Peters should have been on a surgical rotation by now but in a pandemic best laid plans mean little.
Nurses, facing a new risk of death on the job most have never experienced in their careers, have had to completely rewire their thinking, putting their own safety first and the patients’ second.
“That was a really challenging mental hurdle to jump,” Ms Peters said.
A tight-knit team at Westmead, and a culture of pre-shift pep talks and regular debriefing opportunities has been a huge support for the young nurse.
“You could sit down for five minutes and talk about how you’re feeling when you go into a patient’s room and someone is coughing up blood clots how that image has affected you,” she said.
“And if you need five minutes you can debrief with someone who has also seen this and can support you.”
Ms Peters says one of the hardest but most important parts of her work is keeping isolated patients connected to their families.
“A lot of the time if they had a phone we would FaceTime their family and friends. Sometimes we talk on the phone to loved ones and relay the message if they were too drained and fatigued,” she says. “Sometimes we would have the phone there while attending to their care so they could hear their families voices and encouragement, you know ‘we love you we miss you we want to see you soon’ — to make sure they know they have support and people are fighting for them to get better’.”
At work, the nurses work in teams or pairs.
One nurse is decked out in PPE. The other waits outside the patients’ room at the door, ready to deliver anything that is needed to the door frame with nothing more than a knock.
They then step back and the nurse inside collects the supplies with no contact.
“This was to make sure we weren’t using a huge amount of PPE and we were reducing exposure by not too frequently going in and out of the rooms,” Ms Peters says.
HEAVY BURDEN
Wearing the protective equipment requires a deal of resilience in itself.
“The PPE weighs physically. Particularly behind your ears and on your nose. I generally come out quite red. I’m always making sure I’m applying moisturiser. Some people put tape on their nose to stop the pressure building.
“They do leave nasty marks. Particularly the COVID ward we wear the big N95 masks — it’s more like a suction cup on your face so it seals your face and prevents any air from getting in.
They leave visible marks for at least an hour on my face — it’s quite painful after a while. You’re trying to reposition your face but you find it to be stiff.”
Add in the goggles or face shield, gown, hair net and it is hot and tiring work.
But the day-to-day uncertainty of what the virus will bring has been even harder to cope with than the physical burden.
“At the start it was quite intimidating waking up not knowing what you’re going into,” Ms Peters says.
“You want minimal contact with your family, you’re trying to psych yourself up to make sure you’re mentally and physically prepared for every shift. You know the patients need you, you know your team needs you and you need each other.
“It’s quite confronting working in an environment where no one quite understands what’s going on and what we can do to help and better the situation.”
Ms Peters says the recent resurgence of cases beginning in Victoria has impacted heavily on the nursing profession.
“At first we thought we were getting over it and things were coming to a somewhat version of normal.
“To hear it is coming back and to have no control over that is a big issue.
“It makes you sad and scared now because you don’t know what this is going to bring, it’s very hard to interpret.”
But she knows there is no alternative but to keep going “for our grandparents, our family, our kids. We are all trying to save everyone.”