A Tennessee nurse shared her before and after photos that show the reality of eight months working on the front line treating COVID-19.
Tennessee has seen more than 338,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with 4,254 deaths. In the entire country, there have been more than 12.5 million cases and 258,000 deaths.
Kathryn, 27, is one of the countless medical workers on the front line of the pandemic. While people are constantly fed statistics on those suffering from the virus, her photos illustrate the toll on those working on the wards over the past year.
Kathryn spoke to Metro about her experience treating COVID-19 after her Twitter post went viral. She’d posted two images, under the caption: ‘How it started… how it’s going.’
The first photo showed Kathryn after she graduated, the second showed her at the end of a shift, with marks on her face from wearing PPE for hours.
At the time of this writing, her tweet been shared more than 74,000 times and gathered more than 800,000 likes.
“On Saturday night I was in the middle of a shift, had just come out of a patient’s room, and had just taken all my PPE off,” she told Metro. “I had the image in my head of the graduation, and I wanted to show the difference a couple of months can make, and the reality of being a nurse in the pandemic.”
Kathryn said she works a cycle of three 12-and-a-half hour shifts and three days off. While most marks on her face tend to fade after a few hours, the one on her nose disappears just in time for the start of her next shift.
The hospital where Kathryn is working is currently battling another surge of coronavirus, after a previous uptick in July. However, with holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving on the horizon, she fears the worst may be yet to come.
“I’ve resigned myself to the fact that things are going to be at their worst yet in a few weeks, but I just want it to happen now, so we can get it over with,” Kathryn said.point 254 |
“We’ve kind of been in disaster mode, the entire time I’ve been a nurse.point 65 | I’ve no idea what it’s like to be a nurse under normal circumstances.point 126 | We are dealing with so much misinformation and so many conspiracy theories that directly affect what we do every day.point 224 |
”point 3 | 1