Battlefields are often times sights of destruction, suffering and despair. They may also be the stage where heroism can take place and out of them can also emerge signs of hope for the future. Even though some may, for good reasons, disagree with the use of such analogy, it is hard not to feel that the pandemic has been and continue to be a battlefield. We have been bombarded with covid-19 threats, attacked by fear and grief, plunged into darkness and forced to change our lives in order to fight back. In the middle of this battlefield, as the fights were raging in all directions, a light continued to shine. And we could clearly see that flowers of hope were still going strong; flowers of courage and dedication that made all the difference.
Frontline healthcare workers and those who have been working in the background to support them night and day in order to keep our health systems going are the covid war heroes alongside other essential workers that kept our society going. Their selflessness, courage and dedication are the flowers on the battlefield. In this currently growing aftermath feeling, and even though the fight is still very much present in many ways, we now take stock of important failures such as the tragedy that unfolded in long term care facilities. It is normal to focus on issues that need to be fixed, on ways to keep plowing through to achieve a new normal and to take stock of our grief as we lost so many people. Inasmuch as the battlefield is indeed challenging, it shouldn’t prevent us from celebrating our successes and what was done well. In this context, healthcare frontline workers deserve to be first on the list.
At the very beginning of the pandemic, healthcare frontline staff was faced with an unknown enemy that was killing people by the thousands. Horror stories from around the world were being shared on a daily basis and instilled fear. We were ill-prepared to face such a magnified crisis: scientific information was incomplete or non-existent, protective equipment was scarce or inadequate and staffing shortages kept growing in frequency and size to make the situation even more critical. But despite all this, frontline staff kept showing up to help people fight for their lives and to help our systems fight the pandemic. Truly amazing display of courage, dedication and humanness.
As the pandemic progressed and rolled into the management of a serious threat from a state of pure crisis, exhaustion was a recurrent theme amongst frontline staff. Even though there was a short breather during the summer of 2020 that helped some catch their breath and regroup, preparing for the second wave and dealing with it kept staff pressure very high. The second wave brought a greater number of cases and hit many jurisdictions hard; sparing none and even the ones that had been able to manage the first wave relatively well. In a nutshell, what felt like a sprint to the finish line during the first wave crisis management was becoming, in the second wave, a marathon of endless fight against a virus that would not go away. Exhaustion became prevalent but frontline troopers kept going even though many were falling under too much pressure, fatigue or illness.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently estimated that 115,000 healthcare workers died during the pandemic worldwide. In Canada, we were relieved to see the number of deceased healthcare workers stay lower than many other countries but still, don’t we all agree that one is already too many? And the news of one fallen colleague is enough to push fear, despair and exhaustion deeper in brothers and sisters in arms. But frontline staff relentlessly kept at it as this was the right thing to do. This is why they chose healthcare as their calling: to make a meaningful difference. And they did.
Without being too dramatic, I trust most of us feel that our society is what it is because of such display of courage, dedication and humanness. We owe a lot to healthcare frontline workers and we owe it to who they are. Their values and commitment to helping others are what made possible getting through the pandemic the way we did. Some say that our fight was far from perfect and many issues need to be fixed. They are right. But this does not prevent us from witnessing with gratitude that there were, and still are, flowers on the battlefield. Let us pause here to truly acknowledge them. They are a beautiful and moving sight to see… Thank you so much to all of you who made such a difference! You are our flowers on the battlefield, our shining light in the darkness. Let us dwell on that thought for a moment… There will be lots of opportunities to further explore how well or not we managed the battlefield, but these are different stories and good ones for future articles…
In the meantime, may you be well, may you be happy.
B.