“We are all at the limit”

New YorkShe has been looking forward to this Sunday morning for the whole week. The thought of it was often the only thing she could hold on to to keep going. It is ten o’clock, J. has just made himself a coffee. She’s about to get in the car and head out to Coney Island. Go for a walk on the beach, let the wind blow through your hair and maybe even jump into the water, even though the sea is only ten degrees in mid-April.

So J. washes herself off every Sunday a week, this never-ending nightmare that she has been trapped in since the coronavirus hit her hometown New York. “If I didn’t have the beach, I wouldn’t be able to take it.”

J. is a nurse in the emergency room of a major New York hospital. Your employer has not consented to media contact. Since horror reports of chaotic conditions and mountains of corpses leaked out from some of the city’s hospitals, one has become cautious. That is why J. would rather remain anonymous.

She worked 65 hours in the past week. She loaned her Manhattan hospital to a second clinic in Brooklyn because there was a shortage of staff there, and her workload has almost doubled. “Since the virus broke out,” she says, “we’ve all been at the limit.”

The number of emergency patients in New York hospitals has more than doubled since the beginning of March, and around 3,500 patients are currently in intensive care beds. At the same time, almost a third of the staff fell ill. “There is actually someone missing for every shift,” says J. “And we almost all work double shifts.”

It has not turned out as bad as many feared at the beginning. In mid-March, it appeared that the entire New York hospital system was going to collapse. There was talk of a need for up to 140,000 beds, the city only had 20,000 available. There was a lack of protective clothing and ventilators, and chaos had already broken out in some hospitals. Infected patients could no longer be separated from non-infected people; there was no longer any space for the many corpses. The New York healthcare system groaned and cracked at every turn.

But the total catastrophe did not materialize. The city managed to double capacity, and the strict quarantine measures took effect just in time. Since last week, the curve has flattened significantly with new infections and new admissions to hospitals. The city has passed the height of the crisis, even if Mayor Bill de Blasio repeatedly warns that it is still a long way from over the mountain. And J. notices that every day. “There are now significantly fewer patients,” she says. “But those who come are in a much more critical condition.”

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New Yorkers have learned a bitter lesson in the past few weeks. Because so many Covid 19 patients who were not yet in critical condition were initially turned away, they wait longer before calling the emergency doctor. More and more people are dying at home as a result. Initially, these Covid-19 deaths were not counted at all, but when they were finally included in the statistics, the mortality rate in New York skyrocketed overnight.

For J. the new situation means that she has to make momentous decisions hour after hour. “People come in and within minutes I have to think about whether they need to be intubated immediately, whether they should be put on a ventilator straight away, whether a mask is sufficient, or whether I should send them home.”

It helps her and her colleagues that they learn more about the virus every day. “At the beginning it was a complete blind flight. We are only slowly beginning to understand how the virus works. ”Just three weeks ago, J. only looked for the most obvious symptoms such as fever and severe respiratory symptoms. She now knows that the virus can also show itself in a completely different way and can be associated with gastrointestinal or kidney problems, for example.

Above all, however, one has learned not to immediately put people on a ventilator. “We’re delaying this as long as possible. Anyone who hangs on the ventilator for the first time has no good chances of survival. ”At most 20 percent of patients, she says, can get rid of the devices.

And then there are the conversations that J. has to have with relatives, especially those of older patients. A joint and quick decision must be made about what to do if the worst comes to the worst, a case that with the coronavirus can occur at any time and at lightning speed. How aggressive should you be? Should we fight to the last or should it be possible to pass as pain-free as possible? The conversations are never bearable and the answers are always bad.

J. can’t leave all of this in the hospital: “I’ll take it home with me.” The decisions she had to make torment her all night long. “There are patients who just can’t get out of my head.” Only on On Sunday, by the sea, she finds a little peace.

It’s not just worrying about the patient that J. leaves awake at night. It’s also the constant fear that she herself might be the next to hang on a ventilator. “Of course you think about it all the time. Just like every New Yorker thinks about it these days. “

How does she deal with it? “The fear doesn’t really go away,” she says. “It becomes more normal, it becomes a part of you.” A dull feeling when she puts on her protective clothing in the morning and goes to work, a feeling that you have somehow gotten used to and that you can never get used to.

The feeling would of course go away when she could finally take a test and know whether she had already had the virus. But even for people like J., who are on the front lines fighting the coronavirus, there are still not enough tests in America.

If J. were to think about how the US government is endangering her and her patients, she says she would fall into immeasurable anger – just like her mother, who always complains about Trump for threatening her daughter’s life Game sets. But at the moment J. has no strength left to think about politics. “I can only take one day at a time.” Anything else would overwhelm her completely.

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