HARLINGEN — Many families have been through a dark time the past two years with the pandemic, health experts say.
The isolation, the fear of the unknown, the loss of life, and the sudden and radical overhaul of daily lives have left their mark.
Doctors, nurses and other health care workers saw the very worst of it, worrying about contracting COVID while laboring beyond comprehension to tend patients in excruciating misery.
And then there were the funeral directors who handled the deceased, the teachers struggling to provide instruction and the students who lost parents. Kids everywhere had to isolate from their friends, stay home and log in to classes from home.
The isolation and the fear were hard on everyone, and now as we slowly recover we confront the psychological traumas that have befallen us, and those traumas are many.
“I imagine there’s not a single family that can honestly tell me, ‘No, COVID was no problem,’” said Dr. James Castillo, Cameron County health director.
“I think every single family is going to say they experienced some level of distress,” Castillo said. “Health care workers in general who are directly involved with first-hand care of COVID patients in the hospitals did.”
Dark narratives are everywhere about the ICUs overflowing, hospitals filled to capacity and even military medical units deploying to areas of high COVID spread.
“Think about up in New York where they were using garbage bags as PPE (personal protective equipment) and running out of gloves and reusing their masks,” he said. “Add all that together, and I think health care workers had a rough time this past year and a half.”
For them, they had the added stress about possibly bringing COVID-19 home to their families.
“Some doctors were camping out in tents in their back yards,” he said. “So that kind of stuff was happening, and now the next phase is basically what you saw with returning Vietnam veterans with people spitting on them as they’re coming back. Now you’re seeing the same thing happening in hospitals where they’re disrespecting doctors and nurses.”
And now there are bizarre rumors circulating about the virus and the vaccine, the imaginations manifesting as conspiracy theories, experts say.
And those accusations get leveled squarely at doctors and nurses in offices and hospitals, and it’s wearing thin even among the best of health professionals.
“They’re spouting those conspiracy theories saying we’re making them sick, basically spitting on health care workers as if they are the cause of this,” he said. “I’ve gotten lectures from family members trying to explain their loved one is dying because we’re not giving them snake oil and we’re causing them to get sicker. I’ve heard it all.”
Castillo understands this comes from a place of despair. He feels compassion for this state of mind, but there’s a limit to how much of this anyone can take.
“There’s a phenomenon called compassion fatigue,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been worried about, that if this keeps going on that eventually the doctors and nurses will lose so much compassion and they’ll just stop caring or stop working entirely, not take care of patients anymore. And when you do that, now you’ve got a big, big problem.”
This, he said, is the next phase of the COVID-19 nightmare: the mental health phase, very similar to soldiers returning from war.
