Navigating our careers through Coronavirus
The Coronavirus pandemic has changed and uprooted everyone’s life one way or another. Perhaps you are overwhelmed by working from home and trying to juggle homeschooling your children, cooking, and cleaning. Or if you live alone, you may feel incredibly lonely while practicing social distancing.
Perhaps you are an essential employee who continues to work. You may feel blessed to have a job, but worry about the potential exposure for yourself and your family.
Or you may be a small business owner who can’t sleep at night trying to figure out how to hold on for you and your employees.
Or perhaps you are someone who has already been laid off and is unsure how you will provide for your family.
No matter where you lie on the spectrum, there has been a change for everyone. And I hope we can all respect and appreciate each individual situation as we navigate through these changes together.
Celebrating the heroes
We can all agree that first responders and healthcare workers all over the world have been affected. Even if we had physically and mentally been prepared, nothing could prepare us for what was to come.
Healthcare workers and first responders all over the world acquiring the virus and many losing their lives while so unselfishly trying to save others. Providers and nurses so selflessly coming out of retirement or traveling to the most severely affected cities to lend a hand.
Jumping in head first regardless of the risk, because it is what they have been called to do. Navigating unchartered waters with daily changes in practices due to so many unknowns with COVID-19.
Providing care to patients with inadequate supplies in a country that we thought was flawless and prepared for just about anything! Long hours of wearing masks and personal protective equipment, to the point that skin breakdown develops behind their ears.
No department is excluded
It has not escaped any department. Even in my world as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner, there have been “rule-out” and positive cases and we have been exposed. It is scary.
And I have not even come close to experiencing what so many other nurses, physicians, nurse practitioners, respiratory therapists, and healthcare techs have endured. The healthcare workers in the emergency departments and ICUs who are truly on the front line – especially in our cities that have been so affected.
Pure exhaustion and devastation
Healthcare workers moved to tears out of fear, exhaustion, and pure sadness. Seeing more devastation and death in one day than they have witnessed the whole previous year. Supporting their patients in the dying process because otherwise they would have been completely alone.
Unable to process each devastating moment because there are too many more waiting on them.
Many in healthcare who have chosen not to go home and see their family and children at the risk of exposing them. Unable to get a much needed hug from their spouse or children after a grueling day at the hospital. Yet, sadly, you may hear some parents complain about their children being home all day.
So many of my friends, including, but not limited to those pictured below have continued to go to work during the pandemic. We read the daily updates and do our best to keep our patients and ourselves safe!
Give thanks!
So please, take a moment and thank a first responder or healthcare worker today. Although it is our profession and what we are paid to do, the simple “thank you” notes mean so much. The signs outside of the hospitals and the videos of people greeting employees from their cars in the hospital parking lot or from their homes in the city is so beautiful and moving.
After all of this passes, and it will, show those that have been on the front lines some grace. Support them emotionally and check on them frequently. They will need you.
Remembering the patients affected by Coronavirus
We must also remember and honor the patients who have acquired this horrific virus and those that have lost their battle with it. We read and hear heartbreaking stories everyday. The images we have seen on the news or in social media cannot be erased from our memory – even if we try.
Loved ones unable to tell their family member good-bye before their last breath.
So many healthcare workers and first responders losing their life by simply going to work and doing their job.
Give back to the heroes
Consider giving back to honor the heroes.
It can be as simple as a prayer thanking them each night. Help your children write a thank you card to units actively treating COVID-19 patients. Send a catered dinner to a hospital unit or police station. Or simply support one of the many fundraisers to help supply more personal protective equipment for those on the front lines.
Beautycounter is donating a Charcoal Cleansing Bar to healthcare workers through April for every order that is placed. I am personally donating my commission from my event, This One is For the HEROES. I will be supporting a company that is proving masks to Chicago area hospitals and will provide units on the frontline with food.
What can you and your family do to show support? It does not need to be a monetary donation, sometimes the most simple gestures are the most touching.
Stay safe and be well!
