Year of the Nurse

Year of the Nurse is Cassie Alexander's poignant effort to come to grips with suicidal ideation and PTSD after being a covid nurse in an ICU in 2020.

I'm writing this third person like I give a shit. I don't. This is my therapy book. I'm writing it for me, and for every other nurse out there who is angry at how last year went down. I see you. You are not alone.

In addition to being a nurse, I'm a professional author, and I kept track of last year as it was happening. So maybe laypeople can peek in a bit and understand what it was like to have portions of your country and family betray you while you went and risked your life.

Here's how it begins:

On April 25th, 2021 at 10:55 in the morning I messaged my girl’s chat group from where I work as a nurse on an ICU floor: “Nothing like feeling strongly suicidal at a job where you’re supposed to be keeping people alive,” and then tweeted that my “mental health wasn’t great” and deleted the twitter app off of my phone because I didn’t want to “overshare.”

That I felt like dying.

That I would’ve rather died than still be at work.

There were roughly four million nurses in America, as of last year.

Only 2.7 million soldiers fought in the Vietnam War.

Soldiers who came back from Vietnam, after having witnessed -- and in some cases, participated in – atrocities were changed forever.

It would be foolhardy to believe that you could send four million people into a wartime equivalent, without there being psychological consequences.

And yet, that’s what America has done.

We spent a year battling a largely unknown assailant, running low on gear, haunted by the fact that we could bring something deadly home, and getting coughed on by people who pretended that our fights were imaginary and, worse yet, that our struggles – watching people die, day after day, no matter what we did -- were literally unreal.

Nurses are fucked up.

We are going to continue to be fucked up for quite some time.

And unless there’s an acknowledgement and a reckoning, healthcare as we know it in America’s going to be hamstrung for the next decade.

I do not know a single nurse who doesn’t want another job right now. (If you don’t and you’re reading this, if you’re a pedi-nurse or something, congrats. Know that I am very jealous of you and your job satisfaction.)

Even before covid, burn out levels in nurses were epic. In 2018 31.5% of those 4 million nurses changed jobs due to burn out.

A fleeing brain drain is happening right now as I type, as nurses across the nation figure out what their safety and well-being looks like for them. Some people will wind up being stay-at-home-parents, some will go into R&D, and others will just retire a few years earlier then they had planned to, because there’s nothing like watching people die for year to make you think maybe you should go and live. (Unless you’re me, and yeah, we’ll get to that.)

And?

A large number of us hate a large number of you. (Although likely not the ‘you’ reading this book.)

If you spent your pandemic fighting masks, voting for Trump, or going on vacation? Those of us with the blood you caused on our hands actively wish you ill.

I’m just being honest.

We’re going to remember, as we all go into this, our first safe summer.

Because, unlike you, some of us will never get to forget.

This really is a therapy book, and I really was (am?) suicidal. But unlike many in my nursing cohort who got through 2020, I am also a professional writer. I don’t know what I’m thinking half the time unless I write it down -- so I do.

And I kept track of what was happening with me last year. I’m going to go back and cull through my personal journals, emails, and tweets, and share what being a nurse in 2020 was like with you. This book is going to be a kind of scrapbook in that sense, in that I have ancillary material that I’ll quote and share here, in addition to my original thoughts upon it. (Note: I won’t be cleaning up the grammar and spelling mistakes in my tweets, as they’re a matter of public record.)

A lot of it is going to be immediate, and a lot of it is going to be raw.

I’m not here to make apologies about how angry this book will be. I can’t, not when that’s the reason I’m writing it. Because I need to do something, anything, to quench this ember of hate I have in my heart. Jesus can’t touch it and neither can love.

I need someone – you, if you’re reading this – to try and go there with me. I want to take you along and show you what it was like. I want to make you feel my fear and desperation, and this is going to be a ride far more intense than any Stephen King novel.

You might learn some shit along the way – but mostly I just want to not be so alone.

I know a lot of people want to shut the door on the past and move on the future, but to that I say, “How can I?” When this thread of betrayal that this country has woven through me is sewn so deep?

I think this is the only thing I can do that will help to set me free.

And so, now that you’re warned, let’s begin.