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

