2020, the year the world shut down. My husband and I had been living our best lives. John had been a nurse since 2001 and I'd also been a nurse since 2008. We'd been traveling the country as Intensive Care Unit (ICU)/Emergency Room (ER) travel Registered Nurses (RNs) since 2017.
We arrived in Southern Georgia for our ninth assignment in the fall of 2019. We had no idea what we had signed up for when we accepted this extension for our placement there—that this small town was about to become a major epicenter for COVID—that we would see more death in those few months than in all our prior years of nursing combined. We had no idea that the world was about to completely shut down because of a virus, or that we were about to become front-line heroes!
We also worked in Tennessee, Washington state, and Las Vegas, Nevada during those years, losing patients to the Coronavirus in all three states. COVID never changed no matter what state we were working in.
While writing this memoir has been very therapeutic, my true intentions are to provide a look at my experience so others can begin their own healing process. I also want others to understand by reading this memoir that it's ok to make mistakes, and it's ok to apologize for those mistakes. But most of all, even throughout a pandemic and even through a mental breakdown, it's ok to lose your "voice," but it's not ok to give up finding that voice once again.
Dark times are ok for a short time; however, to live in the dark is not living. You need to find your light and adjust to the world that surrounds you, COVID and all!
