‘Do not call me a hero.’ Listen to an ICU nurse’s plea for fighting the coronavirus
After a particularly brutal week caring for COVID-19 patients at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, KP Mendoza considered one final task: writing a will.
He’s only 24 years old, but as a registered nurse in the heart of a global pandemic, it felt like death was stalking him. “I have breathed in stale air all day on a unit rife with the dying,” he wrote in a post on Facebook, “and at the end of those twelve hours, I flinch and scour my unprotected neck with a bleach wipe, hoping that the thin, easily torn, permeable yellow gown I wear as ‘protection’ did just enough to stop the virus from seeping into my scrubs and settling under my skin.”
Mendoza joins William Brangham on the PBS NewsHour on Friday to discuss how the pandemic is burdening America’s health care workers, and how facing death each day has given him a new outlook on life.
You can read his full post here.
Source: PBS News Hour