A New York nurse doesn't sympathize with people who are angry about golf courses being closed: 'People are dying in our hospital right now.'

• As states consider reopening places like beaches and golf courses, a nurse said there's a disconnect between those discussions and what's happening in her hospital.
• "We're in a crisis still," Katie, an intensive-care unit nurse on assignment in Long Island, told Business Insider.
• The coronavirus's unpredictable trajectory and complicated recovery is unlike anything she's seen in her career.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

During a recent shift in a Long Island hospital's break room, a nurse started crying.

Her team had lost a 25-year-old and 29-year-old to the coronavirus that day, but their deaths didn't directly prompt the tears. She was crying because the breakroom TV was airing a local news segment that featured a resident complaining about his golf course remaining closed.

"She just broke down and was like, 'Do you think they really don't get that people are dying in our hospital right now, and he's pissed about a golf course?'" Katie, a fellow intensive-care unit nurse who was there, recalled. "That was a moment that really hit me. Like, nothing is more true."

As states begin to reopen, or consider reopening, places like golf courses, beaches, and restaurants, many residents are pushing them to do so. But Katie, who asked to use only her first name because she doesn't have permission from the hospital to speak to the media, told Business Insider there's a disconnect between those discussions and the reality in her hospital, where the novel coronavirus pandemic remains very real.

"We are in a crisis still," she said. "Be thankful for what you have."

'We're just trying to make sure that people aren't dying or coding right away'

While the number of new COVID-19 cases in New York is declining, things have merely improved from "war zone" to "bad" in Katie's hospital.

Her colleagues described the scene before she arrived on assignment from the West Coast in late April: Nurses were banging on windows to get more support, patients were crashing left and right, and people were getting intubated by the second.

Once Katie's traveling cohort arrived to help, the ICU was so busy with intubated COVID-19 patients that they'd run out of pumps. The devices measure and deliver the correct amounts of various medications, like those for pain and sedation, to a patient through an IV. How much each patient gets and how quickly it's delivered depends on their condition, weight, and other factors.

Without pumps, though, Katie and colleagues had to eyeball it, "which is like done in the 1800s," she said.

"We were just free-flowing, just hanging a bottle of sedation and calculating in our heads what the drip rate should be or what it looks like, which is a skill that they kind of still teach you in nursing school, but it's a joke," Katie said. "I never imagined that would happen, and then it was happening."

These days, they have sufficient supplies, but only because they've gottten creative — assigning one nurse to be a "runner" who never enters patient rooms, for example, in order to conserve personal protective equipment; and wearing gowns from various sources even though some don't work well and feel like shower curtains.

"It's all hands on deck, and you're just taking care of patients and trying to make sure that people aren't dying or coding right away," Katie said.

'I've never seen anything like this in my nursing career, ever'

COVID-19's unpredictable trajectory and complicated recovery is unlike any disease Katie has witnessed. The length of time patients are on ventilators — weeks if not months — is "crazy" too, she said.

Some of those ventilated patients end up dying, others end up with tracheotomies, others suffer strokes, and, for no apparent reason, some recover and go home.

It's those success stories, along with exercise and the camaraderie she feels with her colleagues, that keep Katie going. She recently Facetimed with a man who had been on a ventilator "way too long" but is now home with his family. His voice was raw, his daughter told him she thought he was going to die, and his wife started tearing up.

"He couldn't express himself vocally, but you could just see the pure joy that he was off the ventilator," Katie said. "It was one of those moments where you're like, 'OK, what we do is worth it.' You have to hold on to those."