AARP Hearing Center
Mary Adamson remembers the morning before her first shift caring for COVID-19 patients. The 63-year-old intensive care unit (ICU) nurse in Philadelphia was getting dressed when an unexpected thought stopped her cold.
"I thought to myself, I could die from this,” she recalls.
It was a fear she had rarely faced in her 27 years as a nurse, and it only grew as data emerged showing that those age 50 and older were especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. But Adamson didn't let fear stop her. Like thousands of other nurses across the country, she has spent the past year taking care of sick and dying COVID-19 patients, often without a break.
Now, as vaccinations roll out and the stress on hospitals starts to ease, many nurses are grappling with the emotional and mental fallout of the pandemic. The long hours, their fear of the virus, the early lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), their frustration at people who refuse to take precautions and, especially, their grief over the many, many patients they lost — it all took a toll.
"There was just so much sadness and so much death and just zipping up body bags all day,” Adamson says. “Halfway through, I said, ‘I'm getting out. I can't take it.’ But I rallied and I'm still going.”
A recent Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that about 3 in 10 frontline health care workers are considering leaving their profession because of the pandemic. More than half are burned-out, the survey shows, and 62 percent said the pandemic had a negative impact on their mental health.
The pandemic highlighted the “incredible personal and professional sacrifices” that nurses make every day, says Susan C. Reinhard, a nurse and senior vice president at AARP, who is chief strategist for the association's Center to Champion Nursing in America, an initiative of AARP Foundation, AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
In honor of Nurses Week, AARP asked frontline nurses age 50 and older to share their stories of the pandemic, what they've learned and how they coped. Here's what they want the rest of us to know.
They are emotionally and physically exhausted
Nurses we interviewed described a relentless parade of patients, overflowing ICU units and long days of rushing between patients. Natalie Correll-Yoder, 61, a clinical nurse specialist for critical care services at NorthBay Healthcare in Fairfield, California, says there were several weeks when she worked 12-hour shifts seven days in a row.
"It was nonstop caring for really sick patients,” she recounts. “Our beds would be all full, and as soon as one patient left, a new one came it. There were days you were lucky to get to the bathroom. … It was the most exhausting thing I've ever experienced."
To preserve PPE, nurses took on many jobs that other hospital workers usually perform, from sanitizing rooms to delivering meals. “You completed so many tasks in a 12-hour period that it felt like a whole week's worth of work,” Adamson says.
Cindy Little, 61, an ICU nurse manager at Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, instituted mandatory afternoon water breaks after noticing nurses coming out of patients’ rooms soaked in sweat from the heavy PPE. “You're covered head to toe in plastic, and you might have to spend three or four hours caring for a patient,” she says. “The perspiration just drains off of you."
