Year of the Nurse

<p><strong>This book is for everyone nurse or otherwise who is furious about how 2020 went down -- and how 2021 is going.</strong></p><p><br></p><p>On April 25th 2021 at 10:55 in the morning I messaged my chat group of girlfriends from where I work as a nurse on an ICU floor: Nothing like feeling strongly suicidal at a job where you're supposed to be keeping people alive and then tweeted that my mental health wasn't great and deleted the Twitter app off of my phone because I didn't want to overshare.</p><p>That I felt like dying.</p><p>That I would've rather died than still be at work.</p><p><strong><u>I am not alone.</u></strong></p><p>In 2020 there were roughly four million nurses in America. Only 2.7 million U.S. soldiers fought in the Vietnam War. Those soldiers who came back from Vietnam having witnessed atrocities-and in some cases participated in them-were changed forever.</p><p>You can't send four million people into a wartime-equivalent situation without there being psychological consequences.</p><p>And yet that's what America has done.</p><p>Nurses spent a year battling a largely unknown assailant. Running low on gear. Fearing we might bring something deadly home. Getting coughed on by people who pretended that our fights were imaginary that our struggles-watching people die day after day no matter what we did-were literally fake.</p><p>Nurses are scarred.</p><p>And unless people understand what we went through and commit to never let anyone lie in the future about public health we will never become whole.</p><p><br></p><p>Year of the Nurse: A Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir is Cassandra Alexander's poignant effort to come to grips with suicidal ideation and PTSD after being a covid nurse in an ICU in 2020. Comprised of original essays and her chronological journals tweets and emails as she attempted to save lives including her own-this book will let you experience nursing from the bedside.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>Come and understand what it was like.</strong></p>