I’m greeted today by a nurse sarcastically chanting, “welcome to work” as I walk in. I nervously laugh while passing her and wonder what I’m in for today. It makes me reflect on how I’ve been dealing with this mayhem: dark humor.
The emergency department attracts a certain personality type. Whether a physician, nurse or tech, we all have the ability to laugh when most would cry. How else could we come back to work after doing CPR on a two-year-old or having comforted a family who lost their 90-year-old grandfather? We don’t disrespect the deceased, we just cope with the reality of life with humor. We save our sadness and tears for home.
Today, we joke about wearing scarfs and bandannas as a way to “protect” ourselves from Covid-19. Our administrators told us earlier in the week that our PPE supply would run out in two weeks. We joke about wearing maxi pads across our face or printing slogans about how we really feel on bandannas. We joke that we’re not being compliant with the order to not have more than 10 people gathered together at once, and promptly volunteer to go home to obey orders.
The echo of laughter buoys our spirits as we don head-to-toe PPE to intubate another patient in respiratory distress. We hold our collective breath for the next 24 hours while waiting on the Covid test results to see if we’ve been exposed. Most of us already received calls from the health department telling us to “self-monitor” because our names are on the charts of positive Covid patients. Those dreaded calls are coming more frequently now for many of us, disrupting our opportunities to forget about our situation while recovering at home. We’ve been instructed to keep coming to work as long as we’re asymptomatic. More and more it feels inevitable: Covid will catch us.
Leaving work I begin to wonder how long I can keep up this facade of not letting the virus hysteria get to me. I need to be strong for my co-workers, my patients and my family. Keep my cool. Diminish, deny and deflect until this passes. A short drive home in silence, a quick decontamination shower before bed and prayers that when I awake from sleep all this will be over and I can truly laugh again.
