Paradoxical Lessons of COVID-19: Reflections of a Nursing and Medical Student
My name is Rebecca and I am a Registered Nurse (RN) and a second year medical student at the University of Calgary. I completed my Bachelor of Science in Nursing at the University of Alberta from 2018-2022 and started medical school at the University of Calgary in July 2023. Given the time periods of my schooling, I had the highly unique experience of completing the final two years of my nursing degree during the COVID-19 pandemic, entering the workforce as an RN as the pandemic continued, and becoming a medical student as the healthcare system continues to navigate the current and residual impacts of sustaining a major pandemic. Completing healthcare educational experiences during COVID-19 was highly challenging, but it was also a tremendous personal and professional learning experience. In reflecting on this experience, I realize it taught me several unique, valuable, and interesting paradoxical lessons that have indefinitely shaped my growth as both a person and a healthcare professional/student.
This experience taught me both teamwork and individual skills. Throughout the final two years of nursing school, I entered the front lines during the acute stages of the pandemic and joined several diverse interprofessional teams working to provide high-quality patient care, manage resource use and delegation, and deliver health services amongst a considerably overburdened healthcare system. This substantially developed my teamwork skills as I developed vital new communication and leadership capacities. However, this experience also augmented my individual skills. Persevering through scarce supplies and resources, under-staffing, overtime hours, and managing the emotional aspects of caring for critically ill patients taught me a new level of self-sufficiency, resilience, resolve, confidence, and grit that I previously never possessed.
This experience also taught me a newfound capacity for both grief and love. Throughout my clinical nursing placements, I witnessed firsthand families not being able to see their sick loved ones due to visitor restrictions, strong and healthy patients dying unexpectedly of COVID-19 complications, and patients managing progressive malignancies that went undetected due to reduced primary care services during the pandemic. Witnessing these circumstances and seeing its impact on the emotional burnout of my supervisors, instructors, and peers taught me a new sense of grief I had not experienced before. But, this experience also taught me love. Despite these harrowing circumstances, I directly learned the power of family, friendship, emotional support, and simple gestures such as handholding in healing and mitigating these adversities for patients, families, and healthcare staff.
Further, this experience also taught me both exhaustion and reinvigoration. During my final two years of nursing school, I worked 16-hour clinical shifts, attended several consecutive days of Zoom lectures, donned and doffed endless PPE, bore witness to the burnout of my peers and colleagues, and faced several other exhausting challenges and events. But somehow, this experience also profoundly and vitally reinvigorated me; it heightened my passion for public health, strengthened my commitment to protecting vulnerable populations, and reaffirmed my dedication to public service.
COVID-19 was hard on healthcare workers, and the challenges the healthcare system is going to face in its aftermath will continue to be hard as well. However, the COVID-19 pandemic also indefinitely shaped and empowered a new generation of healthcare students in ways that a classroom never could have. In this way, I am optimistic of my capacity and that of my peers to navigate these hardships and work towards optimal patient, family, and system outcomes. These paradoxical lessons were, and continue to be, imperative principles that ground, guide, and inspire me as I continue my journey as a healthcare student and future medical professional.
