“Seventy patients make a full, eight-hour day in the ER,” he told me. “Yesterday we had 100 patients at the same time.”

Overloaded and overworked—if we gave a State of the Union Address for nursing, that could be its title. Covid hit hard enough to register on the Richter Scale, and the protracted aftershocks have left nurses carrying a crazy overburden.  

What could be crazier than to menace the safety of a healthcare worker—to imperil the life of the people who are working to save ours. Yet aggression and threats have risen over things as simple as ER wait times.

COVID’s secondary effects are almost as hard on nurses as the illness itself because those ER wait times are often created by the patients. COVID had confined and isolated them for so long that they seek treatments for things they’ve delayed or ignored. Patient psychology has always been demanding, but now, with the addition of aggressive family members, nurses are sometimes placed in the position of trying to fight off disease with one hand, and fend off the patient’s own relatives with the other.

To put this simply, we know that nursing is taxing at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. That’s why we’d like to take a moment to say ‘thank you,’ inadequate though it is. Pushing through all this shows far more than job dedication, it shows true compassion. And that’s the foundation of medicine.

We see what you’ve been fighting through for the last three years, and we thank you for your dedication, and your granite resolve. Few can be nurses, and fewer still could endure what you have and continue taking care of your patients—taking care of us.

Because of you, we could say that the State of the Medical Union is Strong, despite all.

We need you, we appreciate you, and we thank you.

Transonic Systems Inc
To Measure is to Know