The message of the fortune cookie had made Sarah Bachand smile, this day in March 2020, when she had just had a bite to eat with colleagues from the hospital.
“The good days are ahead. »
She had pinned it on the nurses’ bulletin board.
A few days later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard. A giant morgue parked in front of the hospital.
Sarah began working in the emergency room with some trepidation. Patients with COVID-19 were sent there. Mostly to die.
Three years later, the nurse still has a lump in her throat when she recalls what she witnessed in the emergency room, then in the CHSLD where she volunteered at the worst of the first wave, before the army arrived as reinforcements.
“The good days are coming,” Prime Minister François Legault announced on April 10, 2020, on the eve of the Easter holiday, as if echoing the message pinned to the bulletin board. He assured that the situation in CHSLDs and private residences for seniors were his priority.
That same evening, journalist Aaron Derfel belied the omen by publishing in the daily Montreal Gazette a shock investigation testifying to horror scenes at the CHSLD Herron. That same weekend, Sarah witnessed similarly gruesome scenes.
She buried all that in a little box that it is painful for her to open.
Despite the passage of time, despite the apparent return to the “beautiful days”, the wounds are still raw when she thinks of the tragic fate of the elderly patients she has seen die and of their bereaved loved ones. She has a feeling of impostor talking to me about it, believing that she only gave a little helping hand in the CHSLD. She dares not imagine what haunts her colleagues at the front who worked there full time.
“It still hurts me to think about that…As soon as I do that, I get very emotional. »
For me, people of this generation have given us everything. They were at war. They gave us the right to vote. They built our society. We owe them so much. To have seen them die without dignity like that… I don’t know how we can recover easily.
Nurse Sarah Bachand
Her first shock at the cruelty of the crisis, Sarah had it when she saw a man in agony on his hospital bed in a glass room in the emergency room. Her incontinence pants had come off, exposing her naked body. His son had had an authorization in extremis to come and see him one last time. He was going to arrive any minute to say goodbye to her.
The nurse could not conceive that the last image that a son has of his father is this one.
“Can I go quickly replace his blanket?”
– No, Sara. We don’t waste an N95 on that. »
She was beside herself. Wasn’t this man’s dignity worth a mask?
On March 11, 2021, as a solemn ceremony marked the first day of national commemoration for the victims of COVID-19, the Legault government promised never to forget the thousands of men and women who lost their lives during the pandemic. .
More than 18,000 deaths later, the duty of memory seems to have given way to oblivion, as if these lives had become statistics. There was no ceremony in their memory last year. There won’t be any this year either. The day of commemoration will be marked by a national half-mast of the Quebec flag.
“I feel like we almost swept all of that under the rug…”
Sarah, like so many others for whom forgetting is impossible, regrets that we have not learned enough lessons from this crisis as we promised ourselves to do, in memory of the victims.
As often repeated by the DD Joanne Liu, a pandemic is an ultramarathon that you have to run barefoot. To succeed, it is essential to take care of caregivers, who are the best and last line of defense.
Three years later, the line of defense is in tatters.
A long-distance runner, literally and figuratively, Sarah had already told me, two years ago, how difficult the nurses’ ultramarathon was at the time of load shedding (1). She feels like the pandemic, while making her stronger, has shattered something inside her.
“There was never really a return to normal for us! »
After 20 years in the public network, completely exhausted, the nurse did what she never thought she would do: she gave in with a heavy pinch to the call of the private sector. She does it with a feeling of guilt even though she knows that it is not her who is abandoning the system, but the system that ended up abandoning her by not offering her decent working conditions.
It was neither a question of salary, nor a dislike of her profession, nor a disavowal of the public network that made her a resilient nurse and put incredible colleagues in her path.
It was almost a matter of survival: like many other nurses, she could no longer stretch a rubber band that ended up breaking under the pressure of the pandemic. The overwork, the nights on call, the feeling that there is always more to do in less time, the load shedding, the fact of constantly being sent to put out unknown fires in other units rather than those she knows how to master perfectly, the quality of care which is deteriorating, the professional conscience which takes a hit, the impossibility of planning an appointment for her children, the physical and mental exhaustion of which she only realized the gravity when she left the public system…
“When I changed jobs in January, my body felt like it was shattered. I think for some time, I was hanging on by a thread… When I was able to have a break, I collapsed. »
She is in the process of rebuilding herself, her heart at half mast. Hoping that we never forget these men and women whose last beautiful days were stolen.