Why I Was Not a Frontline Hero During COVID-19
I’m a registered professional nurse and seeing the coronavirus ravage hundreds of thousands around the world pains me. Having been a part of medical teams caring for the sick, I also know that the symptoms of this aggressive virus are brutal, and recovery is a slow and painful process. Life under the COVID-19 pandemic often feels surreal, more and more like those worst-case healthcare scenarios we lightly joked about as students. I have good friends who are holding down exceptionally difficult professional responsibilities as some of Australia’s important frontline workers. I truly salute them and admire their courageousness in the face of the grave risk to their own health from this aggressive virus. In this the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife declared by the World Health Organization – I salute their vocational commitment to saving the lives of others. But I couldn’t join them to become a frontline hero during COVID-19. I studied towards a Bachelor of Science and finished with a BSc in nursing. The degree opened up many opportunities and after graduating I got my experience at the Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital in Rondebosch, Cape Town – a prestigious tertiary pediatric hospital. Those first months in the neonatal intensive care unit (ICU) were sobering and heartbreaking. I got too attached to those tiny fragments of life – newborn babies who often weighed little over 100 grams and who battled to take air into their not-as-yet formed lungs. When one of the babies died, I realized that, at 23, I was maybe too young to be confronting the fragility of human life day in and day out just yet. I took a job at the King Fahd Medical City Complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, instead. The hospital workforce was a vibrant and tightknit expat community from the Philippines, Ireland, South Africa, Malaysia, US, Indonesia. Many of themwere “lifers,” putting upwith on-the-job stressors like long hours, difficulty
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