DANVILLE, Pa. — Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, health care workers are still rising to the demands of treating the sickest patients. For some doctors and nurses, it's starting to feel like Groundhog Day.
"I never feel anxiety before I go to work, and I do now. I have for the last two years," said Autumn Yordy, a critical response nurse at Geisinger Medical Center near Danville.
Yordy has worked in an intensive care unit for 14 years and responds when patients are coding.
"We go support staff nurses on the floor. We help them if they need help with high-acuity patients."
Yordy says her job has changed a lot in the last two years. Her days are now spent with COVID patients.
"I watch them go from being normal, you and I just needing some oxygen, to getting worse. Then they end up spending a couple of weeks in the ICU, if not longer until they just can't take it anymore or their family decides they don't want to put their loved one through this anymore."
Yordy calls the last two years devastating and says it's taken a toll on her and her coworkers.
"It's made all of us question what we're doing. Do we still want to be nurses? And we do because this is not the reason why we got into it. We got into it because we made a difference, and we helped patients."
They have seen a lot of people die.
"I can't even begin to tell you a number how many people we've seen not make it through that we transferred from the med-surg floor to the ICU."
Yordy says the majority of the patients she sees in Geisinger's intensive care unit are not vaccinated against COVID-19. She wants to encourage people to get vaccinated.
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