Year of the Nurse

As a nurse in the NHS, I was interested to read a US perspective of nursing in the Covid Pandemic. I hoped for vignettes about her patients and their journeys, but this seemed somewhat secondary to Cassie's emotional, psychological and political concerns.
Her descriptions of the stresses piled on by hospital management are appalling and made me very grateful for the extremely supportive management in my own hospital.
Cassie, I salute your work but I could not do it myself.

Note: I received an advanced copy of this book. I read quickly, but not that quickly.

And this is not a book to read quickly. Quite a few times, I put it down to put myself back in the moments described, guideposts for what experience of mine I could share with Cassie. While 2020 was hard for everyone, as every advertisement ever likes to remind us, it was disheartening, impossible, and deadly for nurses.

Like Cassie says, you have to be a bit of a rubbernecker to be an ICU nurse, and similarly I was very interested in what her experience was- there was news coverage of what our “heroes” were doing in 2020, but not nearly enough, as she relates.

This book is a textual scrapbook of her experience, from headlines to group chats to private journals. It was not always an easy thing to read, as someone who empathizes strongly with people, but it was a very important and enlightening thing to read.

As we continue in the pandemic, as it turns bad again, anyone interested in reading this book will want to know this experience, this mindset. We're all so tired. But this perspective is so, so important. Even the “luckier” nurses, geographically, resource-wise, or administration-wise, were ground to the bone in 2020. We can't let them down, not when protecting them is so easy.

Read the book. That's really, after 2020, watching the Delta variant numbers rising, that's all I've got.