K
inesiology senior Alexander
Phillips began working as
an EMT in December 2019,
just months before the COVID-19 pan-
demic swept the United States and
altered our lives forever. As part of the
typical testing protocol for new EMTs,
he was fitted with personal protective
equipment, including a respirator. At
the time, it was business as usual.
“I was tested with (the respirator)
to make sure it functions and every-
thing,” Phillips said. “I’m thinking like,
okay, I’m probably not gonna use that
very often.”
But within a few months, that PPE
switched from a mandatory guideline
to a scarce, crucial resource, as the
U.S. and Michigan experienced a ris-
ing number of COVID-19 cases. Phil-
lips, who is studying Athletic Train-
ing, recalled these turbulent first few
months of work in a Zoom call with
The Michigan Daily.
“(The pandemic) was just con-
stantly changing at that point, it was
like you’d wake up every day and the
news will be saying something dif-
ferent,” Phillips recalled. “And it was
pretty much the same thing at work.
It was pretty chaotic … it just felt like
there was so much information hap-
pening so quickly.”
Phillips wasn’t the only student
who took their medical studies to
the workforce during the pandemic,
but some had more trouble finding
ways to help, like LSA junior Stephen
Moss, studying Molecular, Cellular
and Developmental Biology. Stephen
received his EMT license at the end
of February 2020, around the time the
pandemic began to encroach on life in
Ann Arbor.
“As soon as I tried to find a job, I was
just thrown right off the deep end into
the pandemic,” Moss said as we spoke
over Zoom. “I had just got my license
and then everything shut down, and
the place I wanted to go work at put in
a hiring freeze because they couldn’t
afford to hire more people.”
After spending months applying
for jobs and volunteer positions at
ERs and field hospitals in Michigan
to no avail, Moss returned to his home
state of Rhode Island, where he finally
found some luck volunteering for the
Medical Reserve Corps. By then, it
was already May, and Moss was eager
to get to work.
“One thing that was just really
weird to me was how hard it was to
find a way to help,” Moss said. “I mean,
I was looking for a job, I like getting
paid for my work, but I was also just
looking for a way to help, and it was
astonishingly difficult to do that.”
Moss described getting trained by
the National Guard and being placed
at a testing site in the parking lot of
a senior center. At the time, the U.S.
was experiencing PPE shortages, and
Moss recalled trying not to waste his
equipment while working for hours
in the summer heat.
“Every day we were out there in
like, 80-degree heat, in these enor-
mous hazmat suits, head to toe,” Moss
said. “Everyone had one face shield
that you cleaned … We had to wear six
pairs of gloves. You had three base lay-
ers, and then you had your suit on top,
and then you had three more. And it
was very hard to manage all of that.”
If you are someone like me, who
is not studying medicine or involved
in health care work, it can be diffi-
cult to imagine standing face-to-face
with COVID-19 patients, respond-
ing to 911 calls that report shortness
of breath or administering one nasal
swab test after another. It’s scary to
picture being in such close proximity
to danger, suffering and even death.
It’s part of the reason we tend to char-
acterize health care workers as su-
perheroes; we view them as unafraid,
charging into turmoil and emerging
unscathed.
Dr. Janice Firn, a clinical assis-
tant professor in the Department of
Learning Health Sciences and a clini-
cal ethicist at the Center for Bioethics
& Social Sciences in Medicine at the
University of Michigan, said some-
times the heroizing of health care
workers can become problematic.
“A system can take advantage of
people if we praise them for their self-
sacrificing, but then we start penaliz-
ing people who won’t play the game
or ‘sacrifice to that level’ when actu-
ally maybe they’re just being healthy,”
Dr. Firn said.
Indeed, data has shown that dur-
ing the pandemic, health care work-
ers have experienced elevated rates of
PTSD, anxiety, depression and other
mental health conditions. Some have
even quit their jobs due to high stress
and burnout.
“With the people that don’t re-
ally understand or know about health
care, it feels like there’s a reduction of
health care to a quantitative, check-
ing boxes kind of thing, where it’s like,
‘We have the ventilators, we have the
ICU beds, we’re good,’” Phillips said.
“And it’s frustrating seeing the more
human side of that, and going into
hospitals and talking to the nurses and
working with co-workers who are
just so exhausted and burnt out from
literally a year of doing this, because
that’s the qualitative side of it that is
hard to describe.”
T
he way we portray health
care providers, and our
subsequent expectations
of them, originates from a historical
and social narrative, as doctors and
nurses have been viewed as healers
for thousands of years. Hippocrates,
an ancient Greek physician and one
of the leading figures in the history
of medicine, urged that doctors have
two main tasks in treating patients:
“to do good or to do no harm.” But
what does “good” mean, and what
does it mean to be a good provider?
Is it casting aside one’s own needs for
that of the patient? Is it stepping away
when the burden becomes too heavy
for effective work? These dilemmas
loom even larger in the context of a
rapidly changing, high-stress situa-
tion like a global pandemic.
I wondered, then, how these pres-
sures fall onto students like Moss
and Phillips, whose first experiences
providing health care — before they
even start their formal careers — are
during the COVID-19 pandemic.
How do these accelerated lessons in
witnessing pain and loss impact their
psyches? How do they grapple with
seeing suffering at work while their
neighbors on campus throw parties?
How do they understand the virus
medically while making sense of the
pandemic socially?
I spoke with five students who
work on the frontlines — EMTs, nurs-
ing assistants, medical technicians,
those who administer COVID-19 test-
ing — to explore these questions. And
while each interview was humbling,
giving hints of that all-familiar hero-
ism, I felt a sense of heaviness behind
their words.
“Even with the medical field, I
think it’s going to be a long process
to recover from it,” Nursing senior
Rebecca Petrella said. “Not even just
cost wise, but mental health wise, for
everyone who went through it. And
it’s hard to think that I’m just about to
start off my medical career because I
already, in a sense, feel burnt out from
having to go through all of this.”
***
Petrella started working as a pa-
tient care technician (also known as
a nurse’s assistant) at the beginning
of March 2020. Within a week of the
new job, she was told their floor, an
adult pulmonary and general medi-
cine unit, would be filled solely with
COVID-19 patients.
“I had about a week of orienta-
tion, which was normal,” Petrella said.
“And then I came back the next week
and they were like, ‘Yeah we’re all CO-
VID now. Is that fine with you?’ And I
was like, ‘I guess.’”
Petrella described the energy in
the hospital for those first few months
of the pandemic as nervous and un-
certain. And while she didn’t worry
too much about getting sick herself,
Petrella told me the fear of infecting
others kept her isolated for most of
the summer.
“All my friends went home, and I
didn’t have family here, and I was re-
ally worried about passing it to other
people,” Petrella said. “So I basically
went to work and my apartment the
whole time, and it was really hard
mental health wise.”
That isolation was compounded
by what she saw at work — patients
struggling with or dying from COV-
ID-19, some being moved to the ICU,
others asking her if they would die.
“
Just hearing patients’ stories
about everything was really hard and
really sad,” Petrella said. “I was very
much in my own headspace and in-
ternalizing a lot of things … As a nurse,
you’re told to leave work at work, and
that’s sometimes really hard to do.”
While incoming health care work-
ers are trained to deal with the pain,
grief or death of their patients, being
thrust onto a COVID-19 floor as an un-
dergraduate is a new phenomenon, to
say the least. And yet, one of the most
celebrated traits of health care profes-
sionals — one especially heightened
during the pandemic — is adaptability.
“At this point, what I’ve gotten way
better at doing is separating myself
from patients,” Petrella explained.
“And I can still feel that empathy with
them while I’m with them, but after
that I need to just leave it behind me
and think about the general picture of
everything that’s going on.”
Nursing senior Reagan Cloutier
expressed a similar sentiment when
we spoke over Zoom. Cloutier, who is
the president of the Student Nurses’
Association, works as a nursing assis-
tant at the C.S. Mott Children’s Hos-
pital. Throughout the pandemic, the
floor she works on has admitted both
COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 pedi-
atric patients.
While children experience mild-
er COVID-19 reactions than adults,
many of Cloutier’s patients are chron-
ically ill, and are thus at greater risk
for complications if afflicted with the
virus. Cloutier described how one
of her greatest fears during the pan-
demic is that she will unintentionally
infect one of these patients with COV-
ID-19. But despite this anxiety and the
tense energy in the hospital, Cloutier
spoke confidently about her work as a
nursing assistant.
“Being resilient health care pro-
viders is really important because …
you’re not going to see a patient die
every day of your career, but you cer-
tainly are going to deal with heavy
stuff almost every day of your career,
and it’s good to know and have the
skill set to be able to deal with that,”
Cloutier said.
Nurses often spend the most face-
to-face time with patients, especially
during the pandemic, when the hos-
pital limits the number of people
such as visitors allowed in COVID-19
rooms. For that reason, nurses are not
only providing medical attention and
information, but also emotional and
social support. Of course, this means
that they bear witness to — and help
mitigate — tough situations.
“It’s important as a nurse to in-
ternalize those things your patients
are telling you, but it’s also important
to protect yourself, so that you know
that’s not coming home and affecting
your day-to-day life,” Cloutier said.
“And that you’re able to come home
and enjoy your life and not necessar-
ily live in your patient’s grief or live in
your patient’s concerns or worries.”
It’s a mentality that takes time
to build, according to Dr. Firn, who
spoke about the training of young
health care professionals in dealing
with patient loss and pain.
“I don’t think we necessarily go
into these sort of service positions
thinking we’re going to help people
die,” Dr. Firn said. “That’s a lot of what
health care is, but I don’t think we do
a good job of training folks in an area
where we can talk about it.”
Dr. Firn mentioned that pre-clini-
cal exposure to topics in grief and loss
can help health care professionals
better react and empathize with pa-
tients. She noted a course like this that
she took during her own education in
medicine and social work, which she
said had significant impacts on her
clinical work.
“It did help me, sitting with those
uncomfortable feelings,” Dr. Firn said.
“And sort of playing out those sce-
narios meant that I had done some
of the pre-work, so I could be more
present to patients and families in the
moment.”
But Dr. Firn noted that it’s diffi-
cult to mimic this gradual, classroom
introduction to grief during the pan-
demic; and while Cloutier and Petrel-
la both indicated that the pandemic
had strengthened their emotional du-
rability, I wondered if it was enough,
considering how new they are to the
workforce.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
For student first-responders,
COVID presents social
and personal dilemmas
BY MAGDALENA MIHAYLOVA, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT
ILLUSTRATION BY KATHERINE LEE
Wednesday, March 10, 2021 — 11
Read more at MichiganDaily.com