With no testing kit to check on her medical status, the sister of my colleague in Georgia, US, who showed all the signs of having contracted the new coronavirus or Covid-19, seemed not sure of her fate. The Kapampangan nurse in Georgia is just one of the many medical frontliners who were now feeling the pressure of battling an invincible and insidious pandemic that now claimed more than 21,000 lives in the US.
This as the superpower that is the US scrambles to get the necessary testing kits and ventilators to stem the surge of the contagion that was now flaring up in all corners of the old US of A. Without a clear plan to stop the infections and restarting the economy, the US is now at the mercy of the pandemic which blanketed the whole world in a pall of gloom.
The pressure of the daily grind at the pandemic frontline was clearly aired by Ms. D’neil Schmall, ER ICU Nurse currently working for rapid reponse team against Covid-19 in New York, the epicenter of the disease in the US.
Between sobs, Schmall said: “Today been really a rough day, I just feel like there’s only so much that anyone can take. I’m tired, I’m walking into rooms and your patient is dead, just walk into a room and there is a dead body in there. I feel so much sadness for my fellow nurses, sisters, and brothers that have lost their lives taking care of people. I feel bad for the patients who are living especially the ones that are hanging on, hanging on by a thread.
“I don’t know, I just feel like just because we’re a health care worker that we… a nurse would be immune to this, and were not.
“People don’t understand how stressful this job is. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. But it’s so stressful. We’re just stressed just like everybody else, sometimes I think people just forget were human too.”
Yes, the superpower that is the United States, on its death knell, now needs all the help it can get – from testing kits, ventilators and face masks. Although, with his usual bravado US President Donald Trump does not need a facemask as shown in his press briefings.
In Angeles City, Pampanga, two young nurses contracted the disease while attending to a Covid-19 positive patient. The patient has since died and now the two nurses were infected themselves. These faceless young nurses in the pandemic frontline are heroes. Anyone who will discriminate them should be put in jail.
The medical frontliners and other individuals who support the battle against Covic-19 are now the real heroes. Neither the senators nor the congressmen or wily councilors and barangay captains who were now missing and nowhere to be seen.
In support of our medical frontliners in Pampanga, nurses at the Diosdado P. Macapagal Memorial Hospital in Guagua, Pampanga have supported “We Light As One,” in a bid to boost the morale of the frontliners. The medical frontliners particularly those two Angeles nurses now battling the disease had shown uncommon valor. We are hoping to see these two nurses to extend our deepest gratitude. At their young age, they had shown so much not only for the people of Angeles but to the whole world.