Our friends in health care have seen plenty to impale the heart in this pandemic, but nothing more tragic than this: the sight of guilt-ridden children who believe they’ve killed an unvaccinated parent by bringing the virus home.
“And as they’re dying, the kids are at the bedside apologizing,” a hospital nurse tells me.
“You’ve actually seen that?” I ask her.
“Multiple times,” says the nurse.
My Kansas City nurse friend, who can’t use her name because she isn’t authorized to speak to the media, occasionally shares this inconceivable, untold tragedy with dinner companions who obnoxiously insist on spouting their anti-vaccine views to her over burgers and beer.
Some of them are shamed into silence by what she tells them. But others cling stubbornly to their defiance, even after hearing of parents who have left their children motherless or fatherless because of it — and left them with a lifetime of self-reproach for something that clearly wasn’t their fault.
Of course it isn’t the kids’ fault they got sick and may have gotten their unvaccinated father or mother deathly ill. While Dad or Mom could’ve easily gotten vaccinated, the children could not have. “But they still just feel terrible, because they feel like they killed their parent,” she says.
COVID vaccine resistance goes on and on and on, even amid the delta variant and amongst the caring hospital workers who can help, if not the dying patients then their survivors. Astonishingly, many of those who have seen a loved one die still refuse to get vaccinated.
“We discuss it. We try to push it. Our doctors try to push it,” my friend says of efforts to vaccinate the survivors of COVID’s dead and dying. “It seems more often than not they don’t want it.”
Good God, why not?
The nurse says most complain they don’t know what’s in the shot or they just don’t trust it or the government. Or they say they’ve gone this long without getting it, so they should be fine — unlike their loved one who succumbed to it.
Vaccine hesitancy — which feeds my friend’s hospital with an unending stream of patients from some of the most intractably vaccine-hesitant counties in America — shows up even in the most desperately ill. One man on the cusp of needing intubation told my friend’s nursing colleague she was an idiot for being vaccinated.
“He asked her if she’d had her vaccine, and he was just like, ‘You’re stupid,’ ” the nurse says. “Just laid into her about how everybody’s falling for what the government says and COVID’s not real. … While he’s laying in an ICU bed.”
This is the tragedy tucked inside COVID’s calamity. As if our heroes in health care need more on their shoulders, they must deal with hostility toward them and toward the hard-won medicine that could save even the quarrelsome — and perhaps saved their young children a lifetime of groundless guilt for having brought the virus home that killed Dad.
“If that story doesn’t make you change your mind, I just don’t really care to talk with you at all,” my nurse friend says, matter-of-factly. “If that doesn’t bother you, I don’t know what will. It’s mind-blowing to all of us. We just can’t fathom it.”
Still, she and her colleagues work long, incessant hours to save even the belligerent unbelievers, all the while compartmentalizing the monstrous tragedies they endure, just to stay sane and functional.
“I think the worst part is knowing that there’s just no end in sight,” she says. “Even if we get a lull, and maybe the census goes down a little bit, it’s going to keep spiking all winter. And we know that, and it’s just exhausting to think about it.”
Ultimately, the worst part has to be seeing kids who will grow up believing they’ve killed an unvaccinated parent, when in fact stubbornness, ignorance or cynicism did the deed.
Michael Ryan is a columnist and editorial writer for The Kansas City Star.
