Tag: COVID-19

Healing. But First, Grieving

Individually and collectively we need a time of healing, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. 2020, the Year of the Metal Rat, has been a year like no other. The multiple upheavals and uncertainties have taken a large toll on us. We need a time for grieving all that we have lost and continue to lose. Not only the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have already died of COVID-19, but also the mounting job losses, increases in domestic violence, gun-related violence, and social isolation, especially for our elderly and other high-risk people. As we enter the darkest days of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, alongside a second wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths, we need ways of staying hopeful, strong, resilient, and resistant.

What we are experiencing is not simple grief. It is complicated grief. As the Mayo Clinic writers put it, “Complicated grief is like being in an ongoing, heightened state of mourning that keeps you from healing.” Risk factors for complicated grief include social isolation, past history of depression and PTSD, adverse childhood experiences, and other stressors like financial hardships. Medical treatment for complicated grief includes, not surprisingly, grief counseling and cognitive-behavioral counseling. But other treatment interventions known to build resilience and lessen the negative effects of complicated grief are arts-based therapies, narrative storytelling, and other meaning-making activities.

The feminist environmental health and justice writer Terry Tempest Williams, said recently in an interview with Pam Houston, referring to both the very real effects from climate collapse (fires in the West and unrelenting hurricanes in the South) and the pandemic, “We haven’t grieved for it, for the people lost, and if you don’t think that won’t come back at us sideways (well, you’re wrong).”

Key references/sources:

Martha Kent , Mary C. Davies, “Resilience Training for Action and Agency to Stress and Trauma: Becoming the Hero of Your Own Life,” in The Resilience Handbook, eds. Kent, Davies, and Reich, (Routledge, 2013), 227-44.

Josephine Ensign, Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins, (University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2018).

COVID-19 Health Inequities

So proud of our University of Washington nursing students for using their talents and experiences to speak out on important health policy current event issues. This is just one of the student group digital storytelling health policy videos they produced for my spring quarter 2020 healthcare systems course. They consented to me sharing it. I will share additional health policy student-produced videos in future posts. This one is especially relevant to the current outcry across our country about racism, hate crimes, and police violence against black and brown people.

Pandemic Summer Reading

Pandemic summer 2020 reading challenge

Since I have posted a summer reading challenge (with a health humanities/social justice focus) beginning in 2015, I continue the tradition this year. Please support your local independent bookstores because we need them to survive the COVID-19 pandemic. I miss being able to visit in person my favorite local indie Elliott Bay Book Company.

Thirteen books, left to right in the photograph above.

1-3. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy: Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam. Because Atwood can teach us so much through her writing.

4-6. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, The Obelisk Sky, and the Stone Sky. Because I am sadly remiss in reading this important sci-fi trilogy.

7. Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. Because I have never read this bawdy classic of imagined tales by friends escaping the Black Death of 1348 in Florence, Italy.

8. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Had I Known new collection of essays spanning her four decades of journalism. Because I am a big fan of Ehrenreich’s acerbic wit and observations on our society.

9. Tara Wetsover’s Educated. Because I am interested in her take on the power and pitfalls of higher education.

10. Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel mainly because I recently finished reading her prescient dystopian (flu pandemic) novel Station Eleven.

11. American Birds: A Literary Companion, edited by Andrew Rubenfeld and Terry Tempest Williams. Because watching birds in my backyard during the pandemic shelter-in-place spring have entertained and soothed me.

12. Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song, a collection of essays. Because I miss the compassionate and lyrical voice of one of my favorite contemporary writers who died in 2017 from a brain tumor.

13. Louise Aronson’s Elderhood. Because I have heard good things about geriatrician and writer Aronson’s book. And because this is the summer I officially enter elderhood. And because as a society we suffer from extreme ageism as highlighted by our seeming indifference to the high death rates from COVID-19 among our elders. (see Aronson’s article “Ageism is making the pandemic worse” in The Atlantic, March 28, 2020.

Nuts: How We Treat Nurses

May is National Mental Health Month. May is National Nurses Month. The World Health Organization declared 2020 the Year of the Nurse and Midwife. This year, instead of having the typical weeklong recognition of nurses the second week of May (Florence Nightingale’s birthday being May 12th), the American Nurses Association declared the entire month nurses month.

Week one focuses on self care: “Nurse self-care is more vital than ever now as we face the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying stress, isolation, and anxiety.” They include links to daily self-care tips on rest/sleeping, nutrition, and exercise—and a way to sign up for a daily “hope-filled message.” Relaxation techniques. “Mindfulness while wearing an N95 Mask.” Building resilience. Safety at work with a focus on anti-bullying efforts. Obviously, these resources and webpages were designed before the COVID-19 pandemic struck our country and frontline nurses, physicians, and emergency personnel could not access sufficient N95 masks and other personal protective equipment–to be mindful and resilient in.

Self-care is important but insufficient. Access to high quality, low-barrier, affordable, confidential, and non-stigmatizing mental health treatment for nurses is an absolute requirement under any circumstances. But especially now when what we are asking our nurses to do—and all nurses, not just ICU and emergency department nurses-—is emotionally taxing and traumatic at unprecedented levels. And now, during a time of a public mental health and substance use disorder crisis, as the American Public Health Association has declared. And states that continue to have antiquated and punitive state licensing laws for nurses and other healthcare providers, requiring providers to reveal any and all mental health treatment, those state laws need to be changed so that they aren’t an additional barrier to to mental health treatment. (see: “Why don’t doctors seek mental health treatment? They’ll be punished for it” Kayla Behbahani and Amber Thompson, Washington Post, May 11, 2020)

Recommended training resources:

Northwest Center for Public Health Practice has a three-module free, self-paced online training on disaster response, including “Stressful effects of disasters on workers.”

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has an excellent six-hour interactive online training program “Psychological first aid.”

Teaching Health Politics and Policy in the Time of a Pandemic

Where to begin? For one thing, I will begin by acknowledging that I still have a job, and I have a job that can be done from the “shelter in place” comfort of my own home here in Seattle. These are privileges that I am acutely aware that many others in my neighborhood, city, country, state, and world do not have. These are privileges that homeless people I work with do not have.

I will not complain about having to “pivot” (but oh how I loathe that over-used term right now!) and convert a new health politics/policy course from an in-person class format to completely online within a week’s time. I will not complain that the hastily-added Zoom feature on our course websites is already crashing and our spring quarter has not yet begun.

The course I designed and will be teaching starting next week is a required course for all pre-licensure nursing students in our newly revised curriculum that rolled out this past fall. I have a cohort of about 150 students, a mixture of traditional BSN students and accelerated BSN (ABSN) students–meaning they already have a degree and complete their nursing courses in one academic year. The ABSN students will soon graduate and enter the nursing workforce. Many of them, as well as the BSN students, are already working as nurse techs in hospitals and nursing homes. Since most of them live and work in the Seattle area—the site of our country’s first COVID-19 outbreak and known community spread and mounting death toll along with the insane shortage of basic protective gear like masks—they know first-hand two lessons included in my course syllabus: 1) US healthcare is characterized by excess and deprivation (rich people still getting tummy tucks and facelifts while COVID-19 patients die from lack hospital beds/staff/ventilators), and 2) rationing of healthcare is already a reality even before the COVID-19 pandemic reached the US.

Luckily, I had this same cohort of students last fall quarter in a community/population health course which we now lead with instead of including as an afterthought as most nursing schools still do. As part of that course, I had them complete the excellent (and free!) online training modules on disaster preparedness (include mental health/PTSD in first responders) from the Northwest Center for Public Health Practice. I also had them write a narrative policy paper based on Health Affair‘s “Narrative Matters” series of essays. Many of their papers were excellent and based on current event public health/health policy topics.

For the spring quarter health politics and policy course I will have them work in teams (virtually, of course) of ten students and write and produce 8-10 minute personal policy and advocacy storytelling videos based on current event topics (including the pandemic). These are based loosely on the StoryCenter/Nurstory series of videos, although all of theirs are single person-single story videos. (One of my favorites is “Pride and Prejudice” by Maud Low on reproductive rights.) I am excited to see what they come up with and will–with their permission–share/link to some of their final participatory/narrative policy videos at the end of the quarter.

In yet another surreal moment in the midst of numerous such moments during this time, I am struck with the fact that by writing/thinking about “the end of the quarter” I have the simultaneous realization that—assuming my students and I are still standing (or sitting, or lying) by then—we will all have been even more profoundly and personally touched by this pandemic.

What if? What now?

Life is surreal in Seattle in the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, with our rapidly mounting fatalities from the disease and steady upticks in people testing positive (for the fortunate ones who even have access to testing). The bizarre and awkward dance of social distancing with people walking out into our near empty streets to avoid passing other people at too close a distance. Children riding their bikes in circles outside their houses while frazzled-looking parents yell “Keep riding! You need more exercise!” Most everyone who can basically sheltering in place. An ever-expanding menu of options for homeless people to have safer, uncrowded shelter and medical respite services.

Yet the seasons turn, cheery trees blossom along with Wordsworth’s “a crowd, a host, of golden daffodils.” Life goes on. That is part of why it is so surreal. We now have whatever the opposite of the Shakespearean “pathetic fallacy” should be called. Our current sunny, blithely beautiful weather in Seattle does not reflect the ominous, sober, frightened, shocked, and mournful mood that hangs like a dark and virus-laden cloud over our city.

In times of great stress and grief (this is, after all, a time of collective grief for everything we have already lost and anticipate losing), and trauma—of disaster— we need to support all of our first responders. Not just medics and frontline nurses, physicians, public health workers, emergency shelter staff and janitors. To self-plagiarize (from my book Soul Stories: Voices from the Margins):

“Artists and writers are cultural and spiritual first responders in a disaster: they aid in the attempt to make meaning out of catastrophe and chaos, to find ways to not only survive but also thrive in the midst of adversity.”

Views from Seattle-King County, COVID-19 Outbreak

Union Bay Natural Area, Seattle

Week #2 of the Seattle area COVID-19 outbreak with its dark cloud hanging over the city, the nation, and the world, here is what I know to be true:

  1. Know and follow credible, scientifically evidence-based public health recommendations such as washing your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds–or using alcohol-based hand sanitizer (if you are lucky enough to have bought some before every store sold out) and practice sensible social distancing…
  2. Nicely but firmly correct any misinformation and bigotry that comes your way.
  3. Only share information that is from verifiably credible, scientifically evidence-based public health experts. For me here in Seattle that includes Public Health–Seattle & King County and Washington State Department of Health.
  4. Avoid engaging in stupid, fruitless, politically or ideologically-charged arguments (repeat #2 above and this could be a positive way to practice a different kind of social distancing).
  5. Don’t just sit there (unless, of course, you are sick)–do something positive! Support our heroic front-line public health and health care workers like nurses, physicians, medics, and cleaning staff who are working around the clock to care for individuals, families, communities, and entire populations affected by this pandemic. Support our elderly, medically-vulnerable, and people experiencing homelessness. If you are able, volunteer to assist in these efforts.
  6. Remember to get outside or somewhere close to nature to smell the flowers.
  7. Be kind.
Burke-Gilman Trail near Children’s Hospital, Seattle

Nursing in the Time of Pandemics

Having come of age and been a nursing student during the early days of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, I have been feeling many moments of deja vu over the past month with the world-wide spread of the novel coronavirus and the accompanying COVID-19 illnesses. It is, of course, more than a distant global health issue now since I live, work, and teach nursing in Seattle-King County–site of the first death of a patient with COVID-19 and where experts now estimate at least 1,500 people are already infected. The two high-risk groups for severe complications and deaths from COVID-19 are healthcare providers and older people who have underlying chronic illnesses. I fall into one and a half of those categories, so I am concerned on a personal level.

But I am concerned on a larger level because I teach hundreds of nursing students and feel an urgent responsibility to help prepare and equip them to deal with this public health emergency. And not just the practical training and adequate access to the necessary medical supplies–on the use of personal protective equipment like face masks and goggles. But also the emotional and ethical preparation and support for processing a rapidly evolving, complicated pandemic. Acknowledgement that fear and anxiety are part of this but that we have a personal and professional duty to care for people despite that fear and without bias. I like the public health messaging that has gone out from our Public Health-Seattle & King County people: “Viruses Don’t Discriminate and Neither Should We.” Yet it goes beyond that, to an acknowledgement of weaknesses of our healthcare and public health system and resolve to do better, to learn from our mistakes–including from our mistakes in how we handled the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We cannot allow shallow, partisan politics, malicious misinformation, undermining of evidence-based public health interventions, and bigotry to fuel the spread of this virus.