- Nurses who first shared their COVID accounts in 2021 have since seen their lives and jobs forever changed.
- Their stories, in many ways, embody America’s ongoing struggle to process the mental and physical trauma of the pandemic.
A quiet stairwell inside Unity Hospital near Rochester, New York, embodied the pandemic trauma that gripped Kendall Piccirilli, whose first day as a nurse came just weeks after COVID-19 struck in 2020.
When the job quickly got overwhelming, she would sit alone there and cry. Her feelings of helplessness seeded doubt about becoming a nurse. Imposter syndrome seemed destined to derail her career before it started.
But Piccirilli, like thousands of nurses in New York, endured to keep working despite all the unknowns and death. She has since risen to become a nurse clinical leader, the hard-earned promotion forged in those harrowing early days.
“That made me stronger — those challenges — and I look back and the things that made me cry in that stairwell as a new nurse wouldn’t touch me now,” Piccirilli, now 27, recalled recently.
