The “wreckage” left by the Covid-19 passage: Thoughts of a palliative care nurse

Today, according to Johns Hopkins University, the overall number of global COVID-19 cases has exceeded 244 million with more than four million deaths. Humankind is currently facing an unprecedented global crisis. The impact of this crisis on the healthcare system is potentially far greater than we imagine. This narrative presents a series of stories lived by a palliative care nurse in COVID’s time to show how the pandemic itself is a form of inequity and health disparities on the human experience. In my previous narrative, written in April 2020 and published in the Patient Experience Journal Vol. 7, Issue 2, I wrote, “I think how many lives we will lose while we try to maintain life.” Now, we are realizing how many more lives we are going to lose, beside those from COVID-19. Now, we are receiving COVID-19’s spoils and wreckage. Now and in the future, it will be the time for us, as health professionals, to encounter these dramatic stories, the stories of the “children of COVID-19,” the people who were deeply affected and may have died because of the pandemic but without being infected by the virus.