a nurse who gave her life
to help a patient
whose monitor was flashing
Code Blue--imminent death.
She rushed in to help him, without an N95 mask, but 14 days later she died herself, as reported in today's Los Angeles Times.
"I don't want to die," she told her colleagues who were treating her at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Los Angeles.
“The hospital wasn’t giving us appropriate PPE — the N95s were locked,” said one nurse, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity after expressing fear of retaliation from hospital administrators. “It’s just too painful for everybody, what happened to her.”
She was Filipina-American, as are 18% of all American nurses. They have long faced discrimination in hiring, but now they are fighting a new battle along with other medical workers: demanding proper PPE.
The Times published three of the many letters to the editor received decrying the lack of proper protective equipment.
"Shame on our healthcare facilities for putting workers’ lives at risk, and shame on President Trump for not taking control of the supply line in January when he was told of the coming pandemic," wrote Suzanne Brugman of La Habra Heights.
Viktor Frankl considered the suffering of innocent persons while he was imprisoned in Auschwitz.
Suffering and dying only seem to take meaning away from life, he concluded in Man's Search for Meaning (p. 112).
"Is it not written in Psalms that God preserves all your tears?"
"I found myself confronted with the question of whether under such circumstances my life was ultimately void of any meaning," he wrote.
His conclusion: "What is demanded of us," he concluded, is not "...to endure the meaninglessness of life but rather to bear our incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms" (p. 111).
No comments:
Post a Comment