Oh man. Can I tell you something?
I'm so tired.
I need a break so bad. I need to do something, anything different to what I'm living at the moment. Wake up too early, shower eat, work, eat, work, shower, dinner, slump, bed, sleep. Repeat.
When lockdown happens, a part of me wants to stay home too. Can I do that too please?
I'm so burned out. If I can work from home can I? I really need the extra sleep instead of travelling 2 hours a day.
I really need to NOT have COVID as the conversation I have at work with my patients and my co-workers....every...damn...day.
Pandemic fatigue is real, and I'm sleep walking like a highly functioning zombie.
Feeling tired 2021
I really am tired of coming home from interacting with a COVID / Tuberculosis / Influenza / Hepatitis / HIV positive patients and wondering what I'm taking home to the person who is most important in my life.
I'm a scared for a genuine reason. I don't want to be "THE ONE". The one who infects a whole nursing home and kills every resident. The one who gives it to a 5 year old who dies. The one who causes an entire medical clinic, nay, a whole friggin suburb to shut down. Whenever I smell your breath through my N95 mask, I get scared.
Every time I get confirmation that I am caring for a COVID positive person, I get scared. When I see Western Sydney outbreaks around my sister, and COVID positive patients overloading the hospitals my best mates work in (they work in Triage and as paramedics in the center of large outbreaks), I get scared. Then, I see the people I care about and perfect strangers spout anti-vaxx, anti-lockdown, COVID denying, anti-science rhetoric, I get scared, then mad. Then I get tired. Honestly, if you had the guts to help people as I do, as nurses do, you couldn't afford to be so negative to the science being presented. We save lives with that science every day. We put our lives at risk. Every. Day. Are we supposed to put our lives at risk for the ones who specifically increase their risk of getting infected? It's a hard ethical quandary and one that every good nurse and doctor will be battling with on some level.
Could we just let the world go back to normal, and if *you* were anti-science and refused the masks, vaccines, and health advice, and *you* inevitably get sick, then can *you* pay the $10,000 for an ICU bed? No? Then *you* are out on the street. In Australia, we are so lucky to have free healthcare.... People have the gall to make things worse by holding large gatherings which turn out to be super spreaders. It's just a mask. If we do this right, it will only be temporary too, and we can return to life in a year or so. I have faith in that. I have faith in the scientific evidence.
Did you know that children are the ones who die the most from diseases that can be vaccinated against? We do these measures to prevent children dying. If that's more important to you, then enough said. Us healthcare provides sit silently having known *you* ( the anti-science folk ) were here well before this pandemic. I can't say these things out loud, but I certainly hear this in the tea room. For medicos, it's tempting to say:
" Put them (anti-science folk) on an island and when outbreaks happen, wiping out half of them, leave them there with google to give them medical advice."
"Let them be anti-medicine, flout the medical advice, then when they get sick, don't give them a hospital bed. Leave them to figure it out on google."
Healthy cynicism is good, baby, the reason why I do this job is because i question everything. That's what science does. How do these people miss that? Science is the only way to find out about the truth on ANYTHING! Build a car? Science.
Bullets and gun powder? Science.
Cooking food? Science.
The phone you are reading this on? Frickin science!
Washed your clothes in a washing machine with machine powder? Science.
Air conditioning? Science.
Air travel? Science.
Makeup? Science. Are you getting the picture? My goodness. If you don't like the science done to make cars safe, don't buy one. Don't get in one, walk everywhere, I dare you. I see anti-science people akin to religious door knockers. You knock on my door, a perfect stranger coming to my safe place to tell me how I am going to suffer for eternity if i don't read your bed time story book? How about you believe what you believe and leave me out of it? If you don't want to get a vaccine that's fine I don't want to know about it. If you then need to get it so you can travel overseas, then that's still YOUR decision alone. YOU have to make a decision about your body and honestly, why the hell would you trust an aeroplane built on data gathered by a centuries worth of science. Seriously. If you're that scared of needles just say so. There, I said it.