Regarding Dr. Fauci and the pandemic. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. But nothing prepares you for what the first year of this pandemic did to those of us who worked inside a hospital, before there was a vaccine, before there was any real playbook, when all we had was each other and whatever we could figure out in real time.

I watched people drown in their own bodies while fully conscious.

Their lungs filled with blood clots and they fought for every breath while I watched doctors and nurses flip them onto their stomachs, prone, because that was one of the only things that bought them a little more oxygen. I watched teams work on a single patient for hours, adjusting oxygen levels, suctioning airways, trying every position and every ventilator setting, and it still wasn’t enough. You could see the moment someone understood what was happening to them.

Some of them tried to say something and couldn’t get the air behind it.

Then it started coming for us too. Colleagues tested positive one after another. Some got sick enough that they couldn’t work for months. Some came back changed, still fighting fatigue and lung damage years later. Some didn’t come back at all.

Colleagues started sleeping in garages and cars and spare rooms at a friend’s house because they had a parent or spouse going through chemo or a kid with a compromised immune system at home, and they couldn’t risk carrying this back through their own front door. That was the trade so many people made, month after month: keep working the floor, keep saving strangers, and stay away from your own family to do it.

And into all of that, we pushed brand new doctors. Medical students graduated early and got put straight onto COVID units, before they’d had a normal first year, before they’d had time to get their footing. Their first experience of practicing medicine was this.

I sat with people saying goodbye to their kids over an iPad.

I sat with staff who’d been steady for twenty years and watched them fall apart in a supply closet after a fourth death call in one shift. I watched a colleague’s hands start shaking and never fully stop.

The freezer trucks were real. They sat in our hospital parking lots full of dead bodies because the morgues were already full. Los Angelesa and Orange County ran out of room. So did San Diego. So did San Bernardino. Funeral homes couldn’t keep up, so we shipped bodies out of state just to get them embalmed or cremated, because there was nowhere left here to put them.

I was in those rooms.

I don’t think people understand what working in a hospital during COVID, especially that first year, did to so many of us. We weren’t just witnessing death. We were holding the hands of people who couldn’t have their families beside them, watching patients fight for every breath, listening to monitors sound endlessly, and walking into the same nightmare shift after shift for months on end.

The vast majority of healthcare workers who lived through that are still carrying the psychological weight of it. The trauma is so profound that, at times, it feels like brain damage. It changed how many of us think, sleep, react to stress, and move through the world. We’ve barely even begun to understand the long-term effects because so many of us never had the chance to stop and process what happened. We just kept showing up.

Many of us are still living with PTSD, anxiety, depression, moral injury, grief, and memories that can be triggered by something as simple as the sound of an alarm, the smell of disinfectant, or putting on PPE. Some left healthcare because they couldn’t do it anymore. Others stayed, but they aren’t the same people they were before 2020.

You can disagree with individual policies, decisions, or public officials. That’s a separate conversation. But don’t dismiss or rewrite what those of us on the front lines experienced. It wasn’t politics for us. It was real. We watched people die alone. We carried that home with us every night. And years later, many of us are still carrying it.

– Azadeh Ghafari

Read on Substack

We are here as a country. Let’s get some perspective.

– Jay Kuo

Read on Substack