Healing the Wounded Healers
My circle of friends and family includes plenty of caregivers. These folks have been placed in unique and daunting positions in this time of pandemic. This week, some of these friends shared wrenching stories that brought home the challenges they face.
My friend Alex, who operates a food bank, shared that he hasn’t seen his family in a month, choosing instead to self-isolate with a co-worker. “In order to keep my family safe, I have to stay away. I love my work, and I’m doing what I have to do. But it’s taking a toll. If I could just hug my wife and kids, I can confront whatever I have to face. But I can’t even do that.”
Jan told me about her sister, a nurse. “When she comes home after her 72-hour shift, she climbs up a scaffold and enters through their second-floor bathroom window,” Jan shared. “Then she restricts herself to the bedroom and bathroom to avoid contaminating her family. Her husband delivers meals to her, and she talks to her kids through a closed door.”
Tom talked about how he has been taking care of his spouse, a dear colleague of mine, who has had COVID for the past month. “It’s like one step forward and two steps back,” he said. “Just when we think she’s getting better, she has a relapse.” In addition to being a caregiver, Tom is working full-time, and homeschooling their teenage son.
These three examples are mind boggling. But, perhaps the most heartbreaking for me was an account I read from Anthony Almojera, a paramedic from New York City, who chronicled his 16-hour shift for BBC News -
I log on that morning at 06:02. I’m able to go get a bite to eat at the bagel shop. I start to hear the radio get busy around 07:00. We have already had more than 1,500 calls since midnight. I get called for the assignment — a cardiac arrest.
We arrive at the house and I put on my mask, gown and gloves.
We find a man. His family says he has had a fever and cough for five days. We start CPR and I watch the medics pass a tube down his throat to breathe for him and the IV gets started.
We work on him for about 30 minutes before we pronounce him dead. I make sure the crews are OK and get back in my truck — decontaminating everything first. I hit the button to go available.
Twenty minutes later, I get another cardiac arrest. Same symptoms, same procedures, same results. This virus attacks the lungs: you can’t get enough oxygen into your system, then other systems start to shut down and then organ failure.
We hit the button, get another one.
Hit the button after that, get another one.
There’s only one patient we’ve seen so far who I feel wasn’t Covid-19 and that’s because it was a suicide. Imagine: I was there and my brain felt relief. This person’s dead and it’s a suicide. I felt relief that it was a regular job.
It is now around 11:00 and I’ve done about six cardiac arrests.
In normal times, a medic gets two or three in a week, maybe. You can have a busy day sometimes, but never this. Never this.
During his shift, 12 people are assumed to have died of COVID-19. He cannot be certain however, because none of these people had been tested.
I am taken back to the 1990’s when I was on the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. For years, I worked 18-hour days, running a clinic by day and taking care of loved ones at night. A story I seldom share is about how my co-workers forced me to take a vacation in 2001. It was only after I had separated myself from the frontlines that I fell apart. I was utterly exhausted, and bedridden for weeks. When I recovered, I returned to the work, before leaving the field altogether in 2006.
What I learned then, and what I am reminded of now is this: In the midst of a health crisis, all of the attention and care is rightfully focused on those who are sick and in most need. But who is paying attention to the caregivers, who are also suffering from their own emotional and psychic wounds? Who is healing our wounded healers?
While many care providers have practices for self-healing (e.g. meditation/prayer, exercise, counseling, bodywork), they need much more support in times like this. Mr. Almojera writes –
I’m 16 years in therapy, I’m a practicing Buddhist and I meditate, but even I’m having trouble disconnecting now. The emotional drain that happens on days like this stays with you because you know you’re going to have to go to work tomorrow for another 16 hours and you’re going to get it again. We are pretty good at saving people’s lives. But with this virus the odds are against us. We are fighting an invisible enemy that is taking out our co-workers — and right now, hope is fleeting.
In this pandemic, we can’t rely on caregiving and self-care practices that may have worked in prior times: Home or hospital visits — probably not; direct respite care, sorry, no; recharging and connecting with the kids for an afternoon, likely not a good idea; sharing meals, please no; and hugs? So sorry, but not today.
The call is to find new ways to express support, care, and love. In speaking with the essential workers, healers, and caregivers in my circle, we came up with the following solutions -
· Listen to what these caregivers ask for. For example, one friend asked me to send her silly jokes throughout the day (What do you call a group of rabbits hopping backwards? A receding hareline!).
· Listen without trying to fix. One friend calls me as soon as his hospital shift ends so he can shake off the day on his long bus ride home. He is clear that he doesn’t need advice or platitudes. Just someone to lend an ear.
· Try remote healing options. For example, I have arranged a series of virtual reiki sessions for my colleague with COVID, and I made a playlist of soothing music for another friend who can’t sleep.
· Caregiver to caregiver, drop by something scrumptious as an end of day surprise. We’ve done this for our next-door neighbor, who works at San Francisco General Hospital.
Many of us have family, friends and neighbors who are essential workers — health care, security, food services, transportation, education, retail services, first responders, last responders — who face our new reality in ways that we cannot imagine. Every day, they put themselves at risk to keep us safe, healthy, and fed. It’s not enough for us to thank them for being a superhero. Maria Lobifaro, an ICU nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital in Brooklyn, responded to being called a hero in this way:
Part of me feels so proud that the public is supportive. On the other hand, I’m just doing my job. As an ICU nurse you don’t go into the work and not expect to see death. When I’m called a superhero, it sets an unrealistic expectation of how I can perform at work. If I were a superhero, I wouldn’t have to decide if I stand at the bedside of a patient who has a heartrate of 20 and will likely die in the next 15 minutes, or do I go to my other patient who went to the bathroom on themselves and has been in it for two hours because I’ve been so busy — A superhero would know what to do.
Maria is doing heroic work. At the same time, she is a human being who wonders every day whether she is doing the right thing — and whether she can endure being pulled in every direction for one more day. How can we hold up our community healers so that they, too, can make it through?
Let us surround our wounded healers with the love, compassion and care they so greatly need and deserve. Our lives and our recovery prospects depend on it.
Questions for Reflection and Consideration
1. Jot down a list of the essential workers in your life. Think of a simple way that you can reach out to them in a way that is about them and not what you may be feeling.
2. If you are an essential worker, ask yourself perhaps the most frightening questions What do you need? What can you ask for support?
3. For resources on what you can do to support essential workers, go to www.protectallworkers.org and www.dearfrontline.com.
© 2020 by Elemental Partners — All Rights Reserved
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