According to a consultation of the national order of nurses that we publish exclusively, 40% want to change jobs since the Covid crisis.
Like them, other caregivers are taking the plunge.
And make the choice of retraining.
A heartbreak but also a question of survival.
“I would have liked so much to ensure, to continue despite everything.
But I couldn't do it anymore ”.
Her job as a nurse, Margaux, 33, loves her more than anything.
Little, it was her first disguise, that's how it is, she said, impossible to explain why, her life, she saw her in the hospital.
So since she gave back her white coat, on August 1 after the Covid crisis, unimaginably hard, she constantly thinks of her "champions", her colleagues in the field, who are still in this "galley" and force the courage, the one she "did not have," she said, very moved.
"I have the impression of having given up, they are still there".
But his departure was the condition of his survival so it is without regret.
Already, a month before the epidemic, Margaux had decided to become a liberal nurse then the Covid made her return in disaster to the sick, "many were fighting so hard", she recalls.
14 hours in a patient's room
Today, this mother of two wants to accompany breastfeeding women, reconnect with life, far from death.
She left the capital with her family, reuniting with Poitiers, her childhood town, her mother and her grandparents.
"I want softness," she says, making a cross on her ten years in a white blouse, including five in sheaves.
And not in any hospital, in Bichat, where the first Covid patient was admitted on January 24.
First, we had to face this "extremely distressing" wait, before the arrival of the victims of a silent war.
Over the days, even the most phlegmatic chefs looked serious.
“They were telling us, you probably won't see your children much,” recalls Margaux, then the wave hit, knocking everyone out.
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Is she traumatized?
"Touched", she corrects, apologizing for having trouble putting words to "all that".
From this period, when the nurse sometimes stayed 14 hours in a patient's room, there are three that she will never forget.
This survivor, a healthy thirty-year-old father, yet intubated, dialysis, heart and lungs, beating, breathing thanks to a machine.
"When we saw him walking with his wife, we cried, I said to myself, that's why I'm here, it was stronger than anything," exclaims Margaux, reliving this moment of joy.
And then there is this 65-year-old man, on oxygen, a great lover of classical music, with whom the nurse chatted for hours during the treatment, listening to Mozart.
“He told me a lot about his children, of whom he was proud, and then he died.
I wanted to write them a letter, it's a project, I will do it ”.
Another missing person upset him, a young woman she has never seen awake.
After her death, in her room, her son and her husband could not even touch her, because of the strict measures, introduced at the start of the epidemic.
"It was horrible, I had a small swimming pool in the glasses".
Day after day, choking patients are chain intubated.
“What struck me the most were these inhumane procedures, the impossibility of taking care of the sick and their families,” she breathes, full of empathy.
"It's as if I could never leave the hospital"
Little by little, nightmares destroy her nights, fatigue makes her falter, day and night, she is at the front, sometimes 70 hours a week.
Margaux, usually a mother hen, can no longer concentrate, playing with her children is impossible for her.
“I couldn't be with them anymore, it's like I never managed to leave the hospital,” she blurted out, crying in her voice.
She stops, resumes.
“At that time, I didn't even remember the name of a vegetable, I had to describe it for ten minutes to my husband so that he understood what I wanted to eat”.
At the end of confinement, her body can no longer carry her as if her limbs, too heavy, were crushed.
Neurological sequelae of the Covid, argues Margaux, sure to have caught it.
For ten days, she becomes patient, cared for by her own colleagues.
"The day I got back, I fainted, I think I had lost all confidence in myself."
In addition to the sick, she must run after her salary of 2,500 euros, exceptionally high during the crisis, which the hospital forgets to pay her.
One more proof that we neglect caregivers, she thinks, of whom everything is asked.
Margaux therefore left, taking with her the wonderful memory of her colleagues, so united and of her “heroic” patients.
While waiting for her training in a year, she did a few missions in a clinic near Poitiers.
Now it's over.
Margaux has found her children, whom she never leaves.
Appreciate the calm of the streets, the slowness of everyday life and the sun that she watches, at length, go down from her window.
As if everything was starting over again.
She laughs: "I'm broke but I've never been so happy".
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PODCAST. "We are not being prepared for this! ": Léa, 26, medical intern, facing the coronavirus
Sandrine wants to open a table d'hôtes
It was in April, around a dinner.
Sandrine and her husband are wondering.
What do they really like about their job?
Each takes a sheet.
“Relational, being close to people”, lists the 40-year-old caregiver.
“Make good meals,” writes her cook husband.
So why not open a table d'hôte?
Not in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, their current region, but further south, where everything would have to be started all over again.
"Suddenly, we said to ourselves, that it would be a great project", enthuses Sandrine, exhausted by these months at the bedside of Covid patients, in a hospital in Gironde whose name she prefers to keep silent.
Of this first wave, the caregiver keeps a bitter memory, full of anger.
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How were they able to work with FFP2 masks which had expired since 2009, shirts operated on for lack of gowns?
"What also completely undermined me was to accompany families by phone, after a death, without being able to see them take their hand, they were also not allowed to see the body, breath Sandrine, who no longer recognizes the job she loves so much.
How could the state let this happen?
".
A little before the deconfinement, the Covid patients leave the service, it is the backlash, "the depression".
"I had become an automaton and suddenly I released the pressure, my doctor stopped me for two weeks because I was crying all the time."
The idea of opening a table d'hôte, discussed with her husband, is obvious.
No one knows.
It will be in a few months.
In the meantime, Sandrine, like many of her colleagues, in burnout, are asking the same question.
Faced with the second wave, "how will they resist?
Thomas "deeply disgusted"
Keen on comics, Thomas began training to become a bookseller./DR
Of course, he did not take the Covid wave head-on like his colleagues.
But it was after confinement, when the other patients returned to the hospital, that Thomas took over, whipping like crazy in his post-emergency department in Lyon.
In the middle of summer, the 35-year-old nurse realizes that nothing has changed.
After a year of mobilization, an extraordinary crisis, "we always worked 1 day out of 2 understaffed", loose this union member, "deeply disgusted" and disappointed by the announcements of the Ségur de la Santé.
So yes, salaries will be increased but what about the staff, the means?
"When a house collapses, we redo the roof, there we were only given paint."
It's the click, he decides to return his blouse on August 6.
"I said to myself, I'm not going on like this".
Thomas, fond of comics, will be a bookseller.
At least he's going to do some training.
Like Sandrine and Margaux, he asked for his release, and can always come back to the hospital if it doesn't work out.
"I'm trying, I don't have a child, a loan, or a green plant," he smiles.
When I told my colleagues that I was leaving, nobody told me, stay, you'll see, it will work out ”.