New nurse’s before and after photos show painful toll of months spent treating Covid patients

A new nurse has shared before and after photos illustrating the horrifying reality of spending the first eight months of her career on a Covid ward.

The 27 year-old, who only wants to be known by her first name – Kathryn – shared a fresh-faced photo taken just before she graduated in April, next to a recent image of her PPE-scarred face during a weekend shift.

It has since been shared close to 52,000 times on Twitter, with many saying Kathryn’s photo serves to highlight the strains doctors and nurses treating coronavirus are facing.

Kathryn, who works at a hospital in Tennessee, says the worst scar – the red raw wound on her nose – generally disappears just in time for her to begin her next 12-and-a-half hour shift.

She said: ‘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.

‘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.

‘Generally most of the marks fade within a few hours, but the one on my nose disappears just in time for the start of my next shift.’

Kathryn said her hospital previously experienced a surge of Covid cases in July, and is now in the middle of another one. She expects things to get worse still as people meet up for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and is resigned to seeing the biggest surge in cases yet.

The nurse explained: ‘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.

‘We’ve kind of been in disaster mode, the entire time I’ve been a nurse. I’ve no idea what its like to be a nurse under normal circumstances.

‘We are dealing with so much misinformation, and so many conspiracy theories that directly affect what we do every day.

‘There’s an antagonism now between doctors, nurses and the general public that there hasn’t been before.’

Kathryn says she and her colleagues repeatedly try to combat Covid misinformation, but to little avail.

Her hospital is now at capacity with Covid patients, and recently turned office space into extra beds to try and cope with yet more sickly people.

Explaining the horrors she faces on a daily basis, Kathryn said: ‘At this point in the pandemic, healthcare providers know the clinical course that a patient will take, and we are still unable to do a lot about it.

‘We are sitting, watching the patients oxygen saturation drop. There’s nothing else we can do, but their oxygen is still dropping.

‘That is a very difficult thing, to know there is this person who was healthy before Covid, and now we just have to watch them die

‘We’ve had family members die within weeks of each other, people who are young and who shouldn’t have died.

‘We’ve had very elderly patients kept in this state which isn’t alive, but isn’t dead, with tubes coming out of every orifice, there’s things that are worse than death and that’s one of them.’

Kathryn works three 12-and-a-half hour shifts over three nights, then has the following three off.

She paints and hangs out with her boyfriend in her free time, but has been extremely cautious to try and minimize the risk to him.

Despite the impact on her skin, Kathrynsays she is enjoying her career – and that working as a nurse has been the best way for her to deal with the stress of Covid.

She explained: ‘I think I’m in a better mental state than i was before, because i feel like I’m doing something

‘It’s enraging to see people treat this like a joke, but when I’m at work i can help.’

The United States has seen close to 12.3 million Covid cases, and 257,000 deaths.

Kathryn’s home state of Tennessee has seen 334,000 coronavirus cases, and 4,220 deaths.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk

For more stories like this, check our news page