A Nurse Practitioner shares her gratitude toward those who wore masks and practiced social distancing from the start, flattening the curve and saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

I want to share this story because I think everyone is scared, and you may want to hear about areas that are doing well and have had positive outcomes.

 I had been a bedside RN for 3 years before going back to school to become a nurse practitioner. I had only been an NP for 10 months when the pandemic hit. Most people say that you need a year before you feel like you can work with a high level of confidence. Unfortunately, I was not lucky enough to get in a full year before the world changed. 

They vaguely teach you about viruses and how bad they can be in nursing school. We are taught about the most common viruses and how to treat them. They don’t teach you about pandemics.

I remember watching the news and first hearing the term “pandemic” in association with COVID-19. I didn’t think at that time that the predictions for the next few months would actually happen. What do you mean, the whole world will shut down? What do you mean, people will become so ill that they may not make it to the hospital before they die? 

What do you mean people will be so scared that we will lose our grip on humanity? 

But that’s what did happen. People began dying, and the focus became a big bright light on us healthcare workers. We weren’t scared of the attention or the task at hand - I think we were just scared of all the unknowns. 

In the first weeks of the shutdown, things were changing hourly. How to put on PPE, which masks to wear, how to take care of your masks. All of this flurry of changing policies and procedures was maddening. 

We wanted to take care of these patients, and do it safely. There was a daily fear of going into these patient’s rooms and never knowing if we had contracted the virus. Could we be taking it home to our loved ones? This was probably the earliest fear most of us had, myself included.

As the weeks went on, we began to have good days and bad days. We have been able to start to see the light at the end of the tunnel. In my hospital system, the number of COVID ICUs is shrinking. Based on our data, we believe we peaked at the end of March. 

But all of this good news comes with bad news. 

It’s time to start to get back to “normal.” We need to re-open surgeries, we need to let people get their chemo and dialysis. This leads to new fears and to the fears same that I have now. 

I am most afraid that people will become complacent. As states and cities begin to re-open. I am fearful that people will quickly forget all the lives that were lost and what great strides we made by social distancing. I am afraid there will be a second wave and that we as a nation will not be prepared for it.

These are the fears that I live with. The fear of the unknown. I have so many questions that I wish we had the answers to. 

All I know is that for now, I am so darn proud of all the great work my team, my healthcare system, and my city has done. They stayed at home when we asked them to. They wore masks when they didn’t have to. And ultimately, they gave us the time we needed to save as many lives as we could. 

“Being brave isn’t the absence of fear, being brave is having that fear and finding a way through it.” – Bear Grylls.

We will find our way through this.

- Moni Patel, NP (Neuro Critical Care - ICU), Atlanta, Ga