“In our intensive care unit, all 16 beds are occupied, ten patients have Covid-19, they are all seriously ill, they are in an artificial coma, and they have to be ventilated.
All ten are not vaccinated.
We have reached the fourth wave, and it is a wave of the unvaccinated, of course.
Some of the patients are younger than 30, others older than 80. The other day we had a woman here, a multiple mom, 28 years old, who wasn't vaccinated either, and she was doing terribly poorly. She later died. That was bad, especially when you're a mother like me. One or two tears have flowed on me. I thought: My goodness, that should have been avoided. I wonder why people don't get vaccinated. I often hear from patients who are doing better: I just didn't believe that I could have such a difficult course as a young person. But I'm not angry at people who don't get vaccinated - what would I get if I were angry with my patients?
I have been vaccinated for the third time in a few weeks. Like almost everyone on our ward. I have heard from other clinics that nurses want to change jobs if they are required to be vaccinated. When you see how sick the people in my ward are, I can't understand that.
We usually work in three shifts in the intensive care unit, each with eight nurses. We actually have 23 intensive care beds, in an emergency we could even increase to 27. But we don't have the staff for it. That will only work if the hospital goes into shutdown, as it did last winter. At that time we had 21 Covid patients. So that we could take care of everyone, all the orthopedic and operating room staff had to help out. We did twelve-hour shifts. You can do that sometimes, but nobody can stand it in the long run, not on a ward like this, not under the strain. I thought of the people who work from home. I would have liked to have done that too, but of course it doesn't work in my job.
If I look at the number of new corona infections every day, I get scared. I don't want to have to go through what we experienced last November, December, January. We all went beyond our physical and psychological limits. We have taken over many Covid patients with a complicated course from other clinics. These are in the intensive care unit for between six and eight weeks and require extensive care. It takes four to five people to get a patient on their prone position so they can breathe better. And that is not done in ten minutes either, it takes an hour with all the cables on the body. Many patients died over the Christmas holidays, it wasn't easy for us.
Fortunately, none of our colleagues quit, but something has to change in terms of care.
The job has to become more attractive, a better salary is part of it, but more money alone is not enough.
What is care anyway?
Caring is not just about assisting.
Care isn't just carrying the bedpan away.
It was like that maybe 20 or 25 years ago.
Today care is much more than that.
As long as nobody knows, as long as the job is not presented in a more attractive way, the situation will hardly change. "
