The Nurse That COVID Made Me

My name is Skyler Zinn and I was born as a nurse into the COVID-19 pandemic.

I graduated from nursing school in December 2019, ready to take on the busy intensive care unit where I had worked as a nurse aide for two years while finishing school. I chose the nurse who I wanted to train me; a friendly guy named Jason who was smart yet still funny. He was nice to everyone and the critical, dying, hard patients were given to him because he could handle it. I wanted those patients, too. I wanted to be trusted to be a competent, efficient nurse who could save lives and manage stress, just like Jason could.

Eventually, I wished that I wasn’t that nurse.

I began orientation the week before Christmas and could not be more excited to switch from nurse aide green to those royal blue “official” nurse scrubs. Even though I was extremely nervous, I followed Jason like one of the brand-new interns from Grey’s Anatomy; I watched, took notes, asked questions, and probably drove him crazy. I passed my NCLEX licensure exam on January 24th, 2020 and became a registered nurse. I got that bright red “RN” badge and continued my 12-week training to become an ICU nurse.

Our state shut down on March 21st, 2020.

COVID shut down all normalcy. Suddenly, nurses in the hospital started cross-training for other roles. ICU became filled with orthopedic nurses, surgical nurses, and labor/delivery nurses who had been yanked from their comfort zone and landed in our noisy critical care environment. These nurses were rockstars, and those first months were made immeasurably better with their support.

Unfortunately, as they helped with our patients upstairs, we were put on a rotation to help in the outpatient surgery area on the ground floor, aka “the dungeon.” No windows, one door, and tiny rooms only meant to hold a surgical stretcher. Our nurse directors and administrators were tasked with building a brand-new COVID unit with air filtration and creating policies with no pre-existing government guidelines. They brainstormed ways to get supplies in/out of rooms safely and stocked critical meds that had never been needed before. Our building maintenance team even built new doors and walls to make the existing unit safe for COVID patients. Respiratory therapists prepped ventilators and other oxygen devices so that we would have equipment on hand.

All of us were faced with an unknown future and the fear of bringing disease home to our families. We showered in the abandoned psych ward rooms on the top floor of the hospital after our shifts. After shift change, you could see rows of hospital staff changing their shoes in the trunks of their cars in the parking lot. Tiptoeing into the house naked after leaving our “hospital clothes” in the garage became the norm, even though we had just put them on in the psych ward!

My friends and I finished ICU orientation just weeks after the state closed and were launched into the madness along with long-term experienced nurses. I was pushed to learn how to put COVID patients on life support as efficiently as possible, how to titrate multiple medications at the same time, and how to run a code in a tiny patient room that wasn’t big enough to hold all our equipment. We had to learn fast because our patients could crash on us rapidly. I felt supported by my managers to safely improve my skills, and we all worked together to keep our community alive. Restaurants brought us food to eat (can’t go to the cafeteria in COVID scrubs!). Patients’ families sent individually wrapped snacks and sodas to get us through because we often didn’t have time to sit for lunch breaks. Nurses helped other nurses and critical patients were a team effort.

I watched a lot of people die. I have seen things I don’t want to remember. I’ve heard things that I pray never to hear again. But the privilege of being able to be there at someone’s last moment, even as we did everything we could to keep them alive, was an honor that I never want to forget.

Nurses stepped up during the pandemic. Even when our families argued about wearing masks at Walmart, we gowned up under layers of protective gear and worked countless hours to keep high-risk patients in our community alive. Now that the pandemic is “over” and normal ICU life has resumed, we reminisce around nurses’ stations with a mix of dread and nostalgia. Those years changed the healthcare world permanently and have shined a light on how important nurses are.

Even though being born into fire hurt like hell, I’m proud of the nurse that COVID made me.