Over 100 YorkU Nursing students thank front line nurses for their dedication to world health in the fight against COVID-19.
As a student of our profession, watching the COVID-19 pandemic unfold before my eyes has invoked a truly dizzying range of emotions. Even sitting in the confines of my own house, I feel afraid, anxious, and frustrated. The landscape changes daily – hourly, even. Inundated with numbers, data, warnings, precautions, and instructions. As a student I am now able to understand most of the words being tossed around as we struggle to haphazardly paint a picture about what this all really means for us. But if we can wade through all the noise and all the panic, we would see that there are steadfast members of our own communities showing up while we are all staying in. COVID-19 has shown up and literally stolen the air from the lungs of our most vulnerable. Nurse, while we are all at home practicing physical distancing, you are waking up, putting on your scrubs, and leaving your loved ones to work the front lines of a global pandemic that has reached our own home turf. At first I hesitated to use militaristic terminology to describe the context of your current working environment, but then I realized that as Canadians, as North Americans, we are conditioned to bestow immense pride and honour onto our veterans, our armed forces, our military personnel. They, after all, keep us safe from threats to our security. I believe that that same level of pride and honour is more than befitting of any profession that founded on the premise of call and response, and in fact, I would argue that there is NO profession that embodies the call and response model more than nursing. We wouldn’t dare send our state personnel to combat a threat without the proper equipment and protection. It is a national travesty that Canadian nurses, like you, are compelled to show up and carry out your caring work without the protective equipment you so desperately require to do your job safely. Nurses are not an infinite resource that regenerates as fast as it depletes. I am devastated that your safety is not valued as highly as that of other professions.
As part of your response to the national call for help, you have shown leadership in the face of adversity and scarcity. Nurses like you have used your various platforms to show us the gravity of the situation, to debunk misinformation, and to implore people to take the rapidly evolving circumstances seriously. But what scares me the most is people not recognizing your leadership as empowerment to take personal responsibility, instead standing idly by while you become examples of what happens when we don’t listen. Nurses should not be getting sick because you travelled against advice. Nurses shouldn’t bring COVID home to their families because you went to a concert. Nurses should not be forced to reuse masks for days because of bureaucracy and red tape creating barriers to critical resources. Nurses lead because they are experts at assessing risk. Nurses have an invaluable voice at the table when planning for outbreak/epidemic/pandemic response. Nurses know what happens when there are not enough beds, enough rooms, enough equipment. Nurses since time immemorial have mobilized in solidarity against barriers to care and that is something that makes me the most proud to be part of the next generation of nurses, standing beside you, learning from you, writing a new chapter in the legacy of nursing during this new era of globalization.
Thank you, Nurse, for the resolve and bravery with which you do your job, doing the best you can with what you have and embodying the very example of selflessness every time you respond to a breathless cry for help. Thank you for committing not only your knowledge, skills and judgment to your inter-professional team, but your caring, empathy and advocacy toward those who may or may not be able to speak for themselves right now. That you continue to show up and act in your role as a nurse when you surely have your own fears, anxieties, and concerns is nothing short of heroic, and the public is starting to recognize that. Please know that through all this, I see you and I hear you. When COVID is eventually a painful memory in our collective consciousness, let it not be forgotten that we rose above the crisis on the backs of everyday heroes like you, Nurse. And as the saying goes, let the next generation of nurses, like me, stand on the shoulders of giants, like you.
Thank you.
Keep safe,
L.R., York University Nursing student