An ICU nurse went viral for quitting after 19 grueling months of the pandemic. Now, he says he's more relaxed and is encouraging other healthcare workers to do the same.
At the end of March, there were no coronaviruses in the hospital in Jerseyville, Illinois.
Andrew Hudson's video on why he quit nursing in December 2021 has half a million views on Twitter.Andrew Hudson
Andrew Hudson had nervous breakdowns while working in the intensive care unit.
Hudson posted a video explaining why he quit and it went viral.
He encourages other nurses to quit.
Andrew Hudson used to work at a bar where he was familiar with the smell of alcohol.
Hudson smelled like booze when he treated COVID-19 patients in a step down unit at a major Detroit hospital. He saw a label on the packaging. Due to a nationwide supply shortage, the US allowed distillers to make ethanol-based sanitizers.
Hudson chuckled as he said that the federal stop-gap measures and the lack of support he and other nurses received led to burnout and mental health distress in his nearly two years as a COVID ICU nurse.
Hudson did not receive hazard pay while he worked as an intensive care nurse in Michigan and Colorado. He sent his patients' bodies to freezer trucks and re-used masks and gowns.
Hudson came home from his shifts in the intensive care unit with nervous breakdowns.
A video of Hudson quitting nursing has half a million views on social media.
—andrew (@intellegint) December 21, 2021
Hudson said helping patients for months without proper staff and equipment feels like emptying the ocean with a bucket.
He said in an interview with Insider that the way it is right now is not normal.
The earliest days of the pandemic were dark and uncertain
The first few months Hudson was treating patients with COVID were very busy. No clinician knew how to treat the disease back then, so his team would experiment with the now-debunked treatment hydroxychloroquine.
Hudson recalled calling 30 rapid responses in 2020 when his own patients went into a critical level, and many more for other nurses. When death rates in Michigan were over 100 per week, Hudson sometimes brought freezer trucks to hospitals to store bodies.
Hudson taped his dead patients' mouths, noses, and eyelids to protect them from exposure.
He said that it felt like it was medieval.
Insufficient staffing, aggressive patients, and nervous breakdowns
Hudson moved to a small hospital in Denver in 2021. The Delta variant made it difficult for him to treat mostly COVID ICU patients.
Hudson said he cared for at least three patients at once. Safe staffing laws in Massachusetts recommend that nurses only care for one patient in the intensive care unit at a time, and research from the University of Pennsylvania shows that the more patients a nurse must care for, the worse the care becomes.
Hudson's hospital hired travel nurses and newly graduated students to help on the floors of the intensive care unit, but they didn't have enough experience to help manage the toll of the Pandemic.
He had never seen aggression from patients before last year. Patients would be told not to intubate dying patients and instead give them the ivermectin, a parasite killer that does not work against COVID-19.
Hudson came home from his shifts feeling defeated.
Hudson said he became a nurse to help people and make a living. In the last two years, he felt that he was no longer making a reasonable wage for the amount of work he did, and that his patients would continue to die even though he tried to help.
'The system is already collapsed, but now they're gonna have to deal with the ramifications of that collapse'
Hudson submitted his letter of resignation in the second week of December. He doesn't regret his decision, even though he felt bad for his manager.
He said that the units were a mess. We did not have the resources we needed.
After spending some time with his family over the holidays, Hudson threw himself into hobbies, such as a comedy show he co-hosted with his friends, and digital art. He said he would use some time to relax due to the stress of the past two years.
Hudson wants healthcare workers to quit.
If you can leave your job, I think you should. The system is already collapsing, but now they have to deal with the consequences.
The original article is on Business Insider.
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