Mississippi ICU Nurse Shares Harrowing Account: ‘I’ve Seen More Death Than I Ever Thought That I Would See’
Just 35% of Mississippi residents have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, and sadly the tragic result has been predictable and avoidable. One top official at the University of Mississippi Medical Center said on Wednesday that if cases and hospitalizations keep spiking, “I think we’re going to see failure of the hospital system of Mississippi.”
The continuation of the pandemic in the state is also taking a personal toll on medical personnel who are handling the deluge of hospital admissions and deaths. On Wednesday night, Rachel Maddow aired part of a report by NBC News’s Ellison Barber, who spoke with employees at a hospital in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. One of people she spoke with is an ICU nurse named Jen Sartin, who said she’s seen too many people die of Covid.
Barber asked her, “How do you find find the strength to do this again and again and again?”
Sartin’s response was nothing short of dejecting.
“You know, really I don’t have any strength left,” she said. “Honestly, I’ve given so much I can’t keep going. That’s why I decided to move to a different department, because it’s affected me in ways that I never thought possible. And it is not going to get better, and I have to protect myself and my family and my sanity. Because if, you know people aren’t doing what they need to do to protect us, and you know, we’re human. We’re not robots. We’re not machines. We can’t continue to do this forever at this capacity.”
At one point Barber asked, “You’re a nurse on the ICU floor right now, but you’re not going to be anymore?”
“No, I can’t,” responded Sartin, who gave a harrowing account of her time as an ICU nurse in the time of Covid:
I can’t do this anymore. I’ve seen more death than I ever thought I would see in my entire life. I’ve held more hands of patients in their last moments when their families couldn’t be by their side. More than I ever thought I would had. And I know this is the ICU and people pass. It shouldn’t be on this level though.
You know, we–when I chose to be an ICU nurse, I knew this is what I signed up for. But I don’t think anybody really realized this was going to be part of the deal, that this was going to be this exhausting. In every way…
It’s just heartbreaking in every way. I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s overwhelming, and I just, I can’t even really speak about it anymore. I’m so exhausted from mental strain of the process of this. You know? Just, just, it’s all you hear, it’s all you see. You know, this whole debate about vaccines and then coming in here and you wake up every morning and you know that it’s just going to be, to be some devastation, as the day before. You know there’s not really, it’s always a win when somebody leaves and goes home, but they never go home the same way that they came in.
Watch above via NBC News.
