Life As a Health Care Worker During a Pandemic

Different jobs come with different risks. All of a sudden our province’s doctors, nurses, EMTs, as well as anyone else in the health care system were thrown into a world of danger and uncertainty that no textbook had covered.

I was lucky enough to have been able to speak with two amazing women who had been working as nurses in our hospitals since the start of this pandemic. At the beginning of this one nurse, Corinne who worked at St. Clare’s Mercy West recalls “they had a bag on the front desk of our floor where we were to put our N95 masks so that they could be sanitized and reused.”

Corinne has been a nurse for 35 years and in these years she has never seen or thought she would see something like this. “When I came home I would not greet my daughter, son, or husband. I would walk straight up the stairs to shower and change. In the winter months, I would normally bring my sneakers in my bag to change into once I got to work but when Covid-19 hit I left them at work for fear that I could bring the virus home to my daughter who has asthma, and my hubby who has a heart condition.”

When we went into our first lockdown, Corinne left her floor due to the fact that she was only working 8-hour shifts because she was on an ease back caused by an injury that she had received a year prior.

A few weeks later she was on Covid line. Her new job took her outside of a hospital and into an office building, she was still helping by booking swab appointments and more recently booking vaccination appointments.

The other nurse, Deanne, who worked as an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the Health Sciences Center told me “there was a lot of misinformation going around at the start largely due to the fact that no one knew what was happening.” Deanne retired in June after she was hit by a car in the crosswalk at the Health Sciences Center.

Our nurses were isolated from their families, they could not hold their families. Some couldn’t even see them. Our healthcare workers went through so much during this pandemic. We should forever be thankful for all the work that they did and are continuing to do.