Scotti Petersen.Photo: Scotti Petersen
Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Scotti Petersen would havedone her job as a critical care nurse"for free."
“I truly was happy, and I probably would’ve spent the rest of my career at the bedside if the pandemic hadn’t hit.”
But when COVID-19 arrived in the U.S. in February 2020, Petersen was one of the few people at her hospital that was trained to operate ECMO machines, which pumps a patient’s blood outside their body to give the heart and lungs a break, andbecame one of the few treatments for the virus. The machines lived in basement rooms at Petersen’s hospital, and that became where she spent most of the next year.
“The machine itself is a bit finicky, and so you can’t really leave,” she explains. “We spent 12 to 16 hours in these rooms with PPE on sitting with our patients, who a lot of the times were awake. You truly get to know them, and they could be there 60 days or longer.”
“But as we all know, there was no cure for COVID. And so we just ended up slowly watching people suffocate to death. I spent over 2,500 hours in the COVID ICU, and I only saw one of my patients make it home. It’s devastating.”
Scotti Petersen.Scotti Petersen
Petersen appreciated the thought of calling health care workers “heroes” for their work and they would get an occasional thank you from hospital leadership “from the safety of their homes,” but the sentiment wasnot a replacement for actual help.
“I think that nobody really understood what we were doing,” she says. “We were hailed as heroes, but nobody heard our distress. I think we lost a piece of ourselves, and our hospitals largely failed us.”
Petersen started to question why she had survived as her patients died.
“I think about six months into the pandemic, I couldn’t figure out why I was still alive and they weren’t,” she says. “Even now there are many days I wonder why I’m still breathing. I can, of course articulate why my life is valuable. But it feels like I’m acting most of the time. I don’t know why I’m still standing on the ground when many have found their place beneath the earth.”
Petersen was struggling to make it through each day and started to realize that her mental health was severely hurt. She didn’t feel like she “deserved the help,” as someone who was still alive and breathing, but found a therapist who diagnosed her with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, and urged her to leave nursing.
“It was one of the hardest, if not the hardest, decisions I have ever made. But it would’ve cost me my life to stay there,” she says. “I felt like I was abandoning my coworkers and my patients.”
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Petersen walked out of the hospital in spring 2021 and hasn’t been back in one since. But she knew that she “needed a path forward,” and enrolled in a nurse anesthesiology program at Johns Hopkins Nursing School.
“During the pandemic, people came in unable to breathe and I heard their last words and helped them and they trusted me. So I figured that in the profession of anesthesia, I can meet somebody and they can trust me to render them their most vulnerable, and then watch them breathe again and know that they can make it home,” she says. “I think it would be so amazing to do that.”
Right now, Petersen says she has “no idea” how she’ll be able to step foot in a hospital again, but she’s “working really, really hard” to get to that point.
“I know how badly I want to be able to help again. I think that’s how I survive is to find a way forward in helping individuals and seeing individuals survive. But I don’t know how I’m going to do it yet.”
Petersen’s therapy, though, has been prohibitively expensive, and she had to empty her savings to afford it. Now a member of theAmerican Association of Nurse Anesthesiology, Petersen is using her platform tourge for affordable mental care for nursesand to call attention to how many are likely suffering from PTSD, especially with so many leaving the profession.
“I think we institutionally need to start taking responsibility and help people get the help they need,” she says. “I think national staffing shortages are going to continue to be a problem until we acknowledge how and why we got here in the first place.”
source: people.com
