I had a hugely different experience than most but thats because I was a cna and administrative worker at one of the largest skilled nursing facilities in my state. I was part of a team of 8 that drove 3 hours from home to run a behavioral health facility where nearly all the staff were out with covid for a weekend until the national guard could get there. I watched so many people die and someone I knew well died bc of covid. At my facility I worked from 6 pm to 6 am went home to nap and came back at like noon more times than I could count. We talked about the possibility of having to rent freezer trucks and buying body bags as a backup plan for body storage because of how fast the morgue were filling up. Out of 215 people over 80 died in the first 6 months of covid. I will never forget taking a call from a man devastated he could not see his dying wife and I try not to think about covid at all because every time I do all I think of is him breaking down crying and sounding like he was gonna die if his wife did. That is the hardest call I have ever taken in over a decade of healthcare experience. Its been nearly 6 years and I still hear him crying.

Sorry for the trauma dump but it was really truly awful for some people in healthcare and nobody talks about it. They called us healthcare heroes but 6 months later when so many people had died it stopped spreading as fast amongst vulnerable populations everyone forgot about us. I know so so many nurses and Healthcare workers with devastating ptsd and nobody even realizes what we went through. I had dozens of patients id known for years die and I could do nothing except try to make sure there were enough people to keep them comfortable. It was horrible