Front-line fatigue: Pharmacists hit with overwhelming workload, shortages and sometimes an angry public – KSL.com
Melissa Peng, a critical care clinical pharmacist at Intermountain Medical Center, poses for a portrait near Intermountain Medical Center in Murray on Thursday. (Kristin Murphy, Deseret News)
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Melissa Peng, a critical care clinical pharmacist at Intermountain Medical Center, poses for a portrait near Intermountain Medical Center in Murray on Thursday. (Kristin Murphy, Deseret News)
Estimated read time: 15-16 minutes
Editor’s note: This is the sixth in a series of stories looking at front-line fatigue among health care and other workers in Utah.
MURRAY — Sometimes Melissa Peng wishes there could be an observation area in the intensive care unit so people could see what it’s like to treat COVID-19 patients again and again and again while their patients’ families often break down.
Instead of impersonal statistics or a five-second snapshot of a prone COVID-19 patient adorned with countless tubes in many media stories, she wishes she could share what it’s like to see a newborn who is never going to meet his father, an expecting woman who might lose her baby because of preterm labor brought on by COVID-19, or people her own age, who die and leave their children orphaned, all because of an illness that is largely preventable through vaccination and masking.
After years as an advanced clinical pharmacist in a trauma ICU, these are the scenes that stay with her.
People have grown calloused to numbers of COVID-19 deaths and cases, she said, but she wonders if seeing these heartbreaking scenarios would finally get through to the unvaccinated.
“Those kids can never get their parents back. They won’t get their grandparents back. It’s the broken families that get to me because it’s avoidable,” she said.
These haunting scenes are particularly poignant for Peng because she had a baby at the beginning of the pandemic, before the vaccines were fully developed and when scientists were still learning a lot about transmissibility of the virus.
During the day, she would wait until there was a rare quiet moment and go into a call room, disinfect everything as much as possible, and then doff her protective equipment so she could pump milk for her daughter while continuing to work on her computer. But she always grew anxious at the thought of potentially passing the virus to her newborn, who had little to no immune function.
“It always turned out that the 30 minutes I picked to do this, someone could have cardiac arrest or need to be intubated. There were fewer resources in the evening, and there were times when I was mid-pumping and someone would have a cardiac arrest on the floor. I’d have to take off the pump, get the milk in the fridge, put on a different bra, shirt and (protective gear). That part always took an extra couple minutes. I felt some degree of guilt if I couldn’t make it back in time,” she said.
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