You don’t want to know how it’s going

Reasons I’ve avoided answering the most hated question of the pandemic.

There it is again, that uncomfortable moment where I pause and decide how to answer what used to be such a simple question— “How‘s it going?” Should I tell you what you want to hear? That things at the hospital are improving even though they’re not, or that things are hard but we’re getting through it together. Or maybe I should just fill you in on some mundane house tasks I’ve been checking off my list as though it’s pretty much the only thing on my mind.

Or do you really want to know how it’s going?

“Honestly baby, I’m just so sick of everyone dying. I just need one person to recover.”

That’s a text message I received in the middle of my work day today. Because while I’m arguing with marketers over what I think customers really want to see in a headline, my life partner is in the ICU helping patient after patient die less painfully.

My husband has been an ICU nurse for almost 10 years now. He is a healer. He’s pulled people back from the brink of death against all odds. Of course he’s also helped people die comfortably, sitting by their bedside until the very end, alongside their families if they are lucky. But in the last year, he’s gone from having a very sick patient die here and there to all of his very sick patients dying, while more patients wait to fill the ICU beds left behind. The conversations with their families are over the phone now.

“A part of me thinks it’s better that patients aren’t with their loved ones when they die right now,” my husband says. “One thing we do to help a patient get more oxygen to their lungs is flip them onto their stomach for 16 hours a day. This causes their face to become incredibly swollen and distorted, and can even create bed sores on their nose and chin. It’s not a pretty sight and would probably scar their loved ones to be seen that way right before death.”

I relayed this to my dad once. It horrified him, as though I had shared gruesome details of a rare surgery that he didn’t ask to hear. But to me it was top of mind, because it’s nearly every patient my partner sees now. It’s just reality. It’s been my bedtime conversation for a year.

Then there are the patients that have needlessly died, that will never be counted amongst COVID-19 deaths but should be. Such as a patient who comes in and finds out they have stage 4 terminal cancer that could’ve been caught and treated earlier. But the hospitals were overwhelmed, so he stayed away from seeking any medical care for what he thought was a minor health issue. Because of the pandemic, he found out too late.

The ICU beds are full. They’re all still full. The hospital has turned old storage rooms into temporary COVID-19 units, and those rooms are full. When a patient needs to go to the ICU and there are no beds, they are likely to be sent to another hospital with no beds, and so on — so that they end up ping-ponging back and forth between hospitals until a bed opens up somewhere.

And how is my husband holding up?

He is working 16 hours most days. He’s not eating or drinking water in those hours. I’m not even totally sure he’s using the bathroom in those hours. Again and again, I send him to the hospital with a meal, and after he comes home and heads straight to the shower, I pull that meal out of his lunchbox and put it right back into our fridge, untouched.

Every single one of his patients is dying. It is crushing his morale. He can’t help them. He can’t save anyone. By the time any patient reaches his unit, they have no chance.

His patient ratio has changed. Normally, when a patient is extremely sick, they get 1-to-1 care—that’s one nurse dedicated to only them for their full shift. This isn’t possible anymore. He finds himself with two 1-to-1 patients in a day. It’s an impossible task. One time his patient was coding, so he went through the multi-step process to suit up in PPE and entered the room, only for his other patient to start coding in another room.

Meanwhile, the non-ICU COVID-19 nurses have had their ratios change from 3–1 care to 5–1 care. Everyone is stretched beyond their limits.

While my partner’s in the room with a COVID-19 patient, time is precious because it takes so long to get in and out. He’ll stay in there for 3 hours sometimes. Have you ever tried to walk uphill in your mask before? Imagine frantically working to keep someone alive in head-to-toe gear for 3 hours—it gets hot and hard to breathe.

“When I go into a COVID-19 room for a while, I start to meditate,” he says. “Sometimes even just singing a song in my head helps me stay calm and level headed.”

When he finally leaves that room, he suits up to go into the next. He doesn’t get breaks anymore.

And he’s barely sleeping. He wakes up at 5:45am in order to get to work by 7am. He comes home after midnight, and has to shower before bed to keep me safe and to save time in the morning. He also has to shave his face every night, so that the N95 mask fits air-tight to his skin. Then he goes to sleep, and wakes up at 5:45am to do it again the next day.

“One of the things that makes it hard to keep going is that every morning I wake up, I know my day is going to be shit,” he told me one evening.

As an ICU nurse, you never know what you’re going to get each day. It’s a stressful job, which is why nurses normally do 3 days a week of longer shifts. Too many days, even if the shifts are shorter, are too exhausting on the body. So you do 12-hour shifts and hope for the best.

“But now every day, I know I’m walking into 16 hours of hell. Still, I have to get out of bed.”

I just don’t know what to tell my friends and family anymore. You want to hear that it’s getting better. It’s not. It’s still getting worse.

As a family, we’re actually luckier than many others. We don’t have children or elderly loved ones living with us. We are in a state where the union is strong and fights for nurses’ rights as best they can. He’s well paid. I’m safely working from home. On paper, we’re really quite lucky.

So how am I doing?

Like many people right now, my mental health is struggling. On weekdays I wake up alone, work until 5 or 6pm, cook dinner that I know only I will eat, and then I try to figure out how to pass my time alone until bed. On weekends, the hours pass more slowly. I am off of social media, and I don’t watch much TV. Both have exacerbated existing mental health issues for me, so I make do without them. I tend to be half awake for a kiss from my partner in the morning before he leaves, and sometimes I wake up at 2am to feel him asleep next to me in bed. But that’s most of our interactions together when he is working like this.

My proximity to the hospital does not allow me to be in anyone’s bubble. Due to uncertainties, the vaccine hasn’t changed this aspect of my life. I joke with my best friend that I am basically living the same life as my cat right now.

There was a point this year where my mental health hit its breaking point, and I flew home to my brother’s family in Cleveland to recover. Those first few days with them were a blur. I just remember my brother just handing me plates of food again and again as I went about my work day, and slowly I realized that I had stopped feeding myself at some point before.

Their quiet backyard in August was a welcome retreat compared to the busy streets of San Francisco that lie outside my apartment. I played with their baby and got some vitamin D. And each night I went to sleep with my heart pounding in my ears with terror and shame. Terror that I had passed COVID-19 to my family somehow by taking the flight to get to them. Shame for knowing what my husband was now facing alone, with no warm body to sleep next to him at night save for our very chonky cat.

After a month away, I had some life back in my eyes and was ready to go back to my partner. I returned to the same situation, but with a new outlook. We worked hard and fast to move out of the city and into a home in Berkeley with a small backyard. We were very lucky to be able to buy a house during the two weeks when the California sky was on fire. Nobody appeared to be wanting to view or buy houses for that brief moment in time.

I’ve gotten so much better at asking for what I need and recognizing the warning signs of my mental health turning before it gets too bad. I’ve set alarms to leave the house every couple of days for a walk. I dedicate 20 minutes per day to worrying, and then try to not do so at any other time. I’ve been doing okay.

Then the holidays hit, and with them, the recent surge. Every state is different. Some states have had 2 surges, some have never had a lull in cases because their local government has never mandated a shelter-in-place order. For California, this is our third and biggest surge.

Which leads me to today.

I am here to tell you — you don’t really want to know how it’s going. You don’t want to know how my partner is holding up or how the hospital is doing or how I am doing. Because the second I really start telling you, the phone call comes to an end. You don’t want to hear it. And I get it — it’s okay. Every day is a tragedy, and we need to find peace however we can.

So it’s okay to send loving thoughts without asking. It’s okay to hear, “Not good” and not press for more information if you aren’t ready for the emotional weight of it. The truth may not set you free, and that’s fine.

Despite what every marketing email is telling us, we are not all in this together. We’re all doing the best we can, and the “can” part of that statement varies greatly based on economic ability, job status, race, family dynamics, and even our proximity to the truth of what’s happening right now. If you don’t know anyone who has died or gotten really sick because of this virus, I guess I can’t completely begrudge you making poor choices like gathering indoors. I can only share my experience of the pandemic and my husband’s job.

I don’t totally know how to wrap this up. I didn’t write this post to “woe is me” our situation by any means. I just got tired of beating around the bush when it came to answering that fatal question of the pandemic— “How’s it going?” So I’ve laid it all out here. As much as I can comfortably share.

Maybe it’ll help someone else feel empowered to write out their true answer to that question. Maybe it’ll garner some eye rolls from parents or essential workers in far worse situations than mine. Either way, I think it’s safe to say, none of us are doing great right now. And you have my permission, whatever that means to you, to stop pretending.