Covid takes toll on doctors, nurses, emergency personnel on the front line

The Covid-19 pandemic has taken a major toll on healthcare professionals.

Doctors, nurses, emergency personnel and administrators are exhausted – not just from the sheer caseload burden of the past two years related to the virus, the risk of infection, all normal operations on top of it with the emotional, physical and mental strain.

Nobody’s really had time off to take a breather. Medicare24 managing director James Murray said about the uncertainty: “Things in life are not as easy as they seem.

“We walk around every day with a smile on our faces and pretend that everything is okay; and deep down inside our world is falling apart.”

It’s been two years into the pandemic, 3.5 million South African cases later, and a few weeks into the fourth wave and the emergence of the new variant, omicron.

“Covid has been challenging in many forms and many ways. For me, it has been about being in the medical fraternity and facing it every day and wondering when the time will come where I personally get hit by the virus and be man down. I thank God that to date I have never had Covid and [am] still negative,” said Murray.

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Jean Munnik, a nurse who became severely ill with Covid this year, said about the hell she went through. “I was ready to die. It’s a moment you can never describe; the scenes going through your mind in that moment.”

She said it was near impossible to breathe at the apex of her illness and one of the worst experiences of her life.

But it’s not just the risk of becoming sick that healthcare professionals face every day. It’s stigmatisation, wide berths taken by friends and family and the long hours spent on the front line.

“The friendship groups have got smaller and, in some cases, nonexisting as people don’t understand the long hours, its demands and working nonstop all the time,” she said.

“Getting our lives back to some sort of normality seems like a long lost dream right now.”

Murray wondered when the opportunity to return to a sense of normality and enjoying life’s lighter side would come.

In a paper looking at post-traumatic stress in nurses, authors Michelle Engelbrecht, Christo Heunis and Gladys Kigozi of the Centre for Health Systems Research & Development at the University of the Free State, wrote that of a sample of 286 nurses, more than four in every 10 screened positive for higher levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In its abstract, the paper said: “Self-reported risk for contracting Covid mainly centered on being a health worker and patients’ nonadherence to infection prevention guidelines. Unpreparedness to manage Covid patients, poorer health and avoidant coping were associated with PTSD.”

Psychotherapist Louisa Niehaus suggested the pandemic can trigger broken heart syndrome.

“[It] is often preceded by an intense physical or emotional event.

“The heart can often be an indicator to what is occurring within our consciousness. When we are in a state of panic, the first thing we experience is a pounding heart. When we are in a state of calm and at peace, this is reflected in our heart.”

She said the syndrome also manifests physically. “A temporary constriction of the large or small arteries of the heart has been suspected to play a role. People who have broken heart syndrome may also have a difference in the structure of the heart muscle.”

Murray added, emotionally: “It is okay for us not to be okay. It is okay for us to have bad days and be in some cases exhausted beyond conversation.

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“To blue-tick [WhatsApp message read notification] people and not respond as we don’t have the energy to entertain basic conversation and would rather crawl up into bed or in front of the TV and do nothing when we get the chance. To just be silent and be in our own worlds. To take time out of the workplace. We are so exhausted we just don’t want to do anything, any more.”

Niehaus said for many people, social withdrawal can be torturous.

“We have become fatigued. Some of us are suffering from burnout,” she said. “It has been an extraordinary challenge to have work, schooling and our relationships collide with no opportunity for distraction or diversion. In general, we never face such a period of enforced introspection.”

Niehaus said people are in what’s been described as the world’s largest psychological test.

“More than any other group, it needs to be recognised that medical personnel are in danger of getting sick from possible constant exposure. It is normal to be experiencing anxiety and fear.”

– news@citizen.co.za