‘I CRY BEFORE MY SHIFTS’
NURSE’S DEATH SHINES LIGHT ON NEED TO SUPPORT CARE WORKERS
For weeks, Calgary nurse Season Foremsky turned to social media to talk about the toll her work and the pandemic had taken. She spoke about the trauma of seeing people die, the abuse she faced from anti-vaccination protesters, the long work hours and inadequate support.
“I feel like a terrible nurse. I bust my ass 60 hours a week for what? To hear the pandemic’s over, the vaccines are a poison, COVID is a conspiracy, I’m not putting that in my body, and on and on. I work consistently short staffed and I mean dangerously short staffed,” Foremsky wrote on Facebook on Aug. 12.
“Nursing was a calling for me. I always wanted to be in the medical field. Today I want to go off the grid and say f--- this. We’ve suffered an overwhelming trauma that I’m not so sure we are going to recover.”
A month later she wrote: “… Now I’m tired, I cry before my shifts, I have severe anxiety, but I still give the best care I can.”
Foremsky, a mother of two young girls, died of a suspected drug overdose at home on Sept. 27. The nurse cared for COVID-19 patients as an emergency room and intensive-care unit nurse at Calgary’s South Health Campus and was featured in an Alberta Health Services video encouraging others to get vaccinated.
A member of Foremsky’s family said they did not wish to speak to media.
Her death has reinforced what Alberta nurses and national nursing organizations have been saying for years: front-line workers need better support, and fast.
“Our front-line physicians and nurses are under extreme stress and pressure. The pandemic is impacting individuals and our teams both physically and mentally. Our people have been working tirelessly to care for Albertans throughout this long and exhausting pandemic,” said Alberta Health Services president and CEO Dr. Verna Yiu during the government’s COVID-19 update on Sept. 30.
One in three nurses reported having thoughts of suicide, according a recent poll from the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions. Ninety-eight per cent of nurses surveyed reported symptoms consistent with a high to moderate risk of suicide, but fewer than 10 per cent report having accessed mental health services.
The survey also noted a study of Alberta nurses found similar or slightly elevated rates of alcohol and substance use disorders relative to the general Alberta population.
Nurses reacting to the news of Foremsky’s death say mental health and addiction challenges existed before the pandemic and have since come to a boiling point.
Linda Silas, president of CFNU, said the organization was “shocked and saddened” to hear of Foremsky’s death. CFNU represents nearly 200,000 nurses and nursing students across the country.
Nurses are working “in a pressure cooker” right now, she said, but work shortages, worsening physical and mental health, and workplace violence existed before the pandemic.
“Season’s death is a red flag for every individual health-care worker to take a pause and reflect, to say, ‘I need to take care of myself,’” Silas said.
“A lot of politicians are saying, ‘Oh, just hang on, just hang on. It’s the pandemic, we have no control.’ Sorry — we were saying the same thing before the pandemic.”
Unless properly addressed, Canada could see an exodus of nurses within a short time frame. A CFNU survey taken PRE-COVID found 60 per cent of nurses intended to leave their jobs within the year.
“When you hear that 25 per cent of nurses are saying, ‘I don’t want to get out of nursing, I want to get out of health care’ … that, we’ve never seen.”
Still, AHS has not changed to meet the needs of healthcare workers, nurses say.
“As our employer, they have a role in this. They have a responsibility to protect us, to ensure we are safe, and they’re not. I think that’s pretty clear,” said Sarah Bohachyk, Edmonton-area nurse and co-founder of Nurse to Nurse (N2N).
Established last year, N2N is a volunteer organization that invites nurses to get support from their peers for work-related mental and psychological injuries.
The group started in response to a gap in peerto-peer, trauma-informed mental health and addiction supports for nurses, similar to supports available for firefighters or police officers.
However, Bohachyk said this responsibility should not have been left on the shoulders of four nurses working on the front lines of the pandemic to provide some relief.
“So many of my co-workers still in the emergency department are being physically verbally abused every day, still, every day,” she said. “(AHS) needs to acknowledge that they have a role to play and they’re failing us.”
After working stressful, long shifts, some nurses simply go home and try to cope on their own.
“There’s a lot of shame that nurses feel, and we’re just asking that this be heard and recognized, and let’s get to a solution,” said Katrina Stephenson, a N2N cofounder and nurse. Stephenson has dedicated her nursing career to working within a harm-reduction model of care.
“I don’t want to hear about another nurse overdosing, dying in pain because of the work.”
She said the province is not only dealing with a COVID crisis, but an opioid crisis as well. There is an extra barrier for nurses who struggle with addiction who may be afraid to go to an emergency room out of fear of being shamed by a nurses college or someone they know, Stephenson said.
AHS spokesperson Kerry Williamson said counselling teams have been sent to some sites for staff needing immediate support “to help facilitate a healthy conversation and coping strategies for employees.”