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My rant for the day
Oct. 13th, 2021 09:53 amI grabbed this post off of Reddit this morning. I've seen similar posts, but this one really encapsulates the feelings of a lot of ER nurses these days. Their well of empathy has run dry, and they are burning out in droves. Not only are many of our ICUs clogged with easily-prevented COVID patients, but we're losing capacity everywhere as nurses and other staff get burnt out and leave.
I read a thread on a nursing subreddit a couple of days back, and it was not an uplifting experience. Unsurprisingly, the same people who embrace antivax sentiments are also bad patients; abusive, demanding (especially demanding dangerous, debunked treatments) and uncooperative. The thread was littered with depressing observations from RNs. One that really stuck with me was, "One of the dubious benefits of the Delta variant is that they tend to die faster." -- It meant there was less time to get attached to a patient and get your hopes up.
Nurses have run out of empathy because almost all of the people coming in now have refused to get a safe, effective vaccine. Instead, they show up at ER - often long past the point where they should have gone to the hospital in the first place - and just expect the hospital to perform a medical miracle. That's the way it works, right? You ignore all of the preventative steps you could have taken because when you show up at the hospital, knocking loudly at deaths' door, the doctors and nurses will all gather in a meeting and finally agree to try Dr. Schnizzle's controversial treatment. In the next scene, the patient is seen up and talking, and everybody is congratulating the doctor.
In reality, the people go through a cycle of ups and downs. Their blood oxygen level stabilizes, and they get sent home with a bipap, only to crash and get readmitted a day or two later. The nurses have to deal with people bargaining and begging with them until they are mercifully sedated and intubated so that they can spend their last couple of weeks slowly wasting away.
I'm running out of empathy too - especially with the "vaccine hesitant". You don't have a valid medical reason not to get it. I mean, you might, but that would put you in a vanishingly small group of the population. You don't have a valid religious exemption for it - you're hiding behind your religion like a shield to avoid doing the adult thing. You don't have a valid scientific reason to be hesitant either - you are simply hiding behind bad science like a child hiding behind dad's leg when mom tries to give him a Tylenol for his fever.
"It was developed too fast."
No. No it wasn't. They simply completed the work they started decades ago when they began working on a vaccine for the first SARS outbreak in the 90s. This isn't a new vaccine, it's the completion of an old one.
"It uses unproven technology."
No. No it doesn't. The fact that we have this vaccine proves the technology. This is why they spent years sequencing DNA and perfecting the technology that allows them to program the mRNA generators to churn out the sequences that would generate spike proteins. They've been working on this for decades specifically so that they could start producing things like vaccines in weeks instead of years. This is the culmination many years and many billions of dollars in research. This fast turn-around was the whole point.
"It hasn't been tested enough."
Over six billion shots have been given out so far. How big a test group do you need?
"We don't know the long-term effects."
Yes we do. Vaccines have been around longer than you have. You get the shot, it triggers an immune response, and trains your body to fight the disease when it sees it again. Other having the technology to produce it faster, there is nothing different about the way this vaccine works.
Anyway, that's my rant for today.
I read a thread on a nursing subreddit a couple of days back, and it was not an uplifting experience. Unsurprisingly, the same people who embrace antivax sentiments are also bad patients; abusive, demanding (especially demanding dangerous, debunked treatments) and uncooperative. The thread was littered with depressing observations from RNs. One that really stuck with me was, "One of the dubious benefits of the Delta variant is that they tend to die faster." -- It meant there was less time to get attached to a patient and get your hopes up.
Nurses have run out of empathy because almost all of the people coming in now have refused to get a safe, effective vaccine. Instead, they show up at ER - often long past the point where they should have gone to the hospital in the first place - and just expect the hospital to perform a medical miracle. That's the way it works, right? You ignore all of the preventative steps you could have taken because when you show up at the hospital, knocking loudly at deaths' door, the doctors and nurses will all gather in a meeting and finally agree to try Dr. Schnizzle's controversial treatment. In the next scene, the patient is seen up and talking, and everybody is congratulating the doctor.
In reality, the people go through a cycle of ups and downs. Their blood oxygen level stabilizes, and they get sent home with a bipap, only to crash and get readmitted a day or two later. The nurses have to deal with people bargaining and begging with them until they are mercifully sedated and intubated so that they can spend their last couple of weeks slowly wasting away.
I'm running out of empathy too - especially with the "vaccine hesitant". You don't have a valid medical reason not to get it. I mean, you might, but that would put you in a vanishingly small group of the population. You don't have a valid religious exemption for it - you're hiding behind your religion like a shield to avoid doing the adult thing. You don't have a valid scientific reason to be hesitant either - you are simply hiding behind bad science like a child hiding behind dad's leg when mom tries to give him a Tylenol for his fever.
"It was developed too fast."
No. No it wasn't. They simply completed the work they started decades ago when they began working on a vaccine for the first SARS outbreak in the 90s. This isn't a new vaccine, it's the completion of an old one.
"It uses unproven technology."
No. No it doesn't. The fact that we have this vaccine proves the technology. This is why they spent years sequencing DNA and perfecting the technology that allows them to program the mRNA generators to churn out the sequences that would generate spike proteins. They've been working on this for decades specifically so that they could start producing things like vaccines in weeks instead of years. This is the culmination many years and many billions of dollars in research. This fast turn-around was the whole point.
"It hasn't been tested enough."
Over six billion shots have been given out so far. How big a test group do you need?
"We don't know the long-term effects."
Yes we do. Vaccines have been around longer than you have. You get the shot, it triggers an immune response, and trains your body to fight the disease when it sees it again. Other having the technology to produce it faster, there is nothing different about the way this vaccine works.
Anyway, that's my rant for today.
