By Richard van Zyl-Smit, MedPage Today, April 15, 2020
I described to a friend this week the current feeling of being in the hospital with COVID-19, as like sitting under a 1,000V high-tension electricity cable: there is a constant humming above your head, which is unnerving and just does not go away.
Two years ago, I published a book called They Don't Award Nobel Prizes to Dead People about my experience as an academic clinician with a stress-induced anxiety disorder. The context is very different now, but the lessons I learned in that time might be of help to those of you feeling this intangible "humming" -- a sense of anxiety that is neither defined nor visible even with no COVID patient contact -- and for those of you who are caring daily for COVID-19 patients.
The first and most important aspect of this time is to recognize that anxiety is real. This is not something you might have experienced before. For those of us who have previously or currently suffer from anxiety, it is easily recognizable for what it is, but you may never have experienced it quite like this. You are not losing your mind or losing control, you are experiencing a loss of control of your environment. In many ways, the daily changing updates, the ever-changing schedules and call rosters are unsettling at best and can be completely unnerving as we can't be certain from one day to the next. There is not a lot you can do about it, except to acknowledge it and talk about it.
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