Emergency room nurse Jodi Doering wants to remember the happy and big moments in her career where she may have helped save lives.
But through the coronavirus pandemic, the South Dakota nurse also remembers how some of her Covid-19 patients “don't want to believe that Covid is real” even as they go through treatment for the virus.
“I think the hardest thing to watch is that people are still looking for something else,” she told CNN Monday. “People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia. I mean, we've even had people say, ‘well, I think it might be lung cancer.’”
Many of her patients decline to call their family members because they think they’re going to be fine, she said.
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can't be happening. It's not real.’ And when they should be spending time Facetiming their families, they're filled with anger and hatred,” the South Dakota nurse said.
Hospitals in South Dakota are among those particularly stretched thin across the Midwest, which has led this third wave of infections. The number of people hospitalized for coronavirus doubled in the past month. At least 644 people have died of Covid-19 in South Dakota.
“The town I live in has 650 people. So when you put in perspective … that's every single person in our town gone,” she said. “The fact that we have this many deaths in a state this size is mind blowing to me and it’s not currently getting better.”
Being a nurse through this pandemic is like “a movie where the credits never roll,” Doering added.
“You just do it all over again. And it's hard and sad, because every hospital, every nurse, every doctor in this state is seeing the same things. These people get sick in the same way, you treat them in the same way, they die in the same way, and then you do it over again.”
Watch the interview: