Thank You, Nurse Gayana, for Showing People What Life Has Been Like for Families on the Pandemic’s Front Lines

Thank You NotesThank You, Nurse Gayana, for Showing People What Life Has Been Like for Families on the Pandemic’s Front LinesI know our experiences are not the same, but you’ve made mine feel so much less lonely.

By Kate Watson

November 15, 2021

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This is part of Thank You Notes, a series of letters offering gratitude to the people and things that inspire us most. Like many others, Allure has spent the pandemic looking inward. What we found was deep gratitude for the medical professionals that cared for our communities and our country during a profoundly difficult time. Then we wrote.

Dear Nurse Gayana,

Back in February 2020, life looked much different — for both of us. Every day, I’d bundle up my kids and walk them to school, and on the way home, my younger son would ask for a jelly cookie from the Italian bakery. Life was intricate in its pattern, predictable in its rhythm. Comfort was as close as that first morning swallow of a perfect latte, and I could have it anytime I wanted. 

Across the country, on the opposite coast, you were wrapping up your maternity leave, planning to head back to your position as a per diem ICU nurse. You were watching the news with your husband, also a nurse, when you first heard that COVID-19 had seeded in the United States, not yet knowing you’d soon be on the front lines. 

In a different way, my family was on the front lines too. By March, my husband, a first responder, began working what felt like months without end. We came down with a deep and troubling cough that persisted but that we couldn’t officially name. There were no tests available, no guidance that made any sense. We were homebound in our two-bedroom apartment, but there was no safe place to hide. Making our own sourdough and having our groceries delivered didn’t seem to have much of a purpose when every time my husband stumbled in the door, I knew he’d had countless fresh COVID-19 exposures giving CPR without proper PPE. 

The sounds of ambulances echoed through the day and night. I held my tiny son as he slept to make sure he was still breathing, while shaking with coughs of my own, and I read the internet, which seemed to have turned into a useless source of information.  

I felt like nobody understood what my family was going through. I tried once to write about it publicly, in a series of tweets. I was met with bewildering accusations demanding proof that people really were dying of this novel coronavirus, that we really were living through a pandemic of unprecedented proportions.

I was shocked. And I will admit, I couldn’t handle not being believed. I made my accounts private for several weeks, and I stopped speaking up about what my family had experienced. Hearing your story made me feel less alone. 

Throughout the pandemic, you were in the trenches of caring for patients, yet you also shared your story, hoping the public would see and understand what frontline workers like you were facing each day. 

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Whether you put up a quick dance or an honest day-in-the-life view of what it was like to be a nurse in a global pandemic, you reminded us that healthcare workers are humans, with human limitations. Like the rest of us, you were tired and afraid. Yet you kept going, because you saw how important it was. 

Like me, you encountered threats and comments on your own character, but on a much bigger scale. People have accused you of being a paid actor or a fake nurse. You didn’t stop speaking up, in real life and on social media, because you believed you could change someone’s life by revealing what was really going on. 

When people ask me how my family is doing, I still find myself at a loss for words. How do I begin to explain what it felt like, standing between an exhausted loved one and a feverish toddler, with so many questions and no answers? It seems futile to even try, especially to the many for whom these years seem to have cost nothing. We paid the cost, I want to tell them. My family, my marriage, my little boys. Even for the people who didn’t believe us. We pay it still. We always will. 

Posts like yours, Gayana, made me feel that there are other little families like mine, people who saw what we saw and even more. They help me frame the last 18 months in context; though they may have been the loneliest times of my life, my experience is not as isolated as it seemed. 

And when I’m at a loss for words about how we’re doing, I can just pull up one of your TikToks to share. We’re living life. We’re so tired. But we’re looking ahead. But we do know that we will thrive again. If this year has taught us anything, it’s to hang onto hope. 

xoxo,KateKeywordsThank You Notes