Facing burnout amid a prolonged pandemic, some hospital workers want out. ‘It’s just been really hard.’
It was one week in November. Every day, Illinois nurse Jacob Forsman had a COVID-19 patient. And every day, that patient died by noon.
“That was for three days in a row,” he said. “That one just broke me.”
Nearly a year later, he had hoped to be finished with COVID-19 body bags. But Forsman, an intensive care unit charge nurse at Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital, is one of the many hospital workers who continue to treat severely ill COVID-19 patients, a year and a half into a pandemic that many knew would be a slog but most had hoped would ease by now.
“I think the reality has sunk in for me that we’re shifting into the year 2022, and it’s called COVID-19,” Forsman said.
Doctors and nurses and others who help treat and, hopefully, heal, virus patients are still working daily. They still help people breathe, they still hold iPads connected to family members unable to see sick relatives, they still call relatives to summon them for a final goodbye.
“We’re still intubating people, when you can walk into any Walmart and they have signs that you can
