Was not prepared to enter into an entire unit and multiple units with droves of relatively healthy patients who were now fighting for their life with covid pneumonia. When things really started getting tough in my unit, it was a sunday, and i was working, and we were putting down breathing tube after breathing tube in these patients. We got up to 14 or 15 ventilators in our 18bed icu, and it was just one after the other. And we were all scared. Nobody knows how to navigate this, and were just taking it shift by shift and day by day, trying not to get overwhelmed. One of the things thats really hard for us is as icu nurses, were used to having constant access to our patients. We have very sick patients, and were used to going in there and assessing them and reassessing them. But now we have to really cluster our care to try to cut down Exposure Time in the room. The less time in the room, the less time we have to be exposed to the disease, the less chance we have of bringing it home to
Former Orange County native Willy Joseph Cancel, the first United States citizen killed in Ukraine this week, was honored by local officials for fighting alongside Ukrainian soldiers battling the Russ.