Hey everyone, it's Anna.

We recently got an email from a listener named Lindsay.

She's a nurse practitioner who lives in Philadelphia, and she's currently working in an ICU in New Jersey, about an hour and a half away from home.

She normally works in pediatric oncology, but because her husband has already had the coronavirus, she volunteered to work with adult

COVID patients for the time being. Lindsay is 28, and she's been working as a nurse since she was

in her early 20s. And we here on the team thought her email about her job right now and

struggling with what a good death means today was really important and beautiful.

So we asked her to record her thoughts. Here's Lindsay.

I've been surrounded by death in my job. I mean, as an oncology nurse, I've washed children before taking them to the morgue. I've comforted families as they leave the hospital without a child and mourned and grieved

with my coworkers for a life cut so short.

In end-of-life care and oncology, we focus a lot on what constitutes a good death for a patient and their family. Obviously, there are some

unexpected deaths that are devastating, but the oncology community is a small one. And we really

try to grieve together as a family against, you know, the insidious enemy that is cancer.

But COVID is really changing the way I'm seeing death.

I knew patients were sick and I knew healthcare workers were struggling.

But what I didn't even fathom is that like the deaths that you see from COVID are the worst kind.

Right now I'm at a small community hospital without many resources.

They have one iPad in the whole hospital for families to FaceTime their loved ones,

but the iPad can't go in the room to bring them close because then it's considered contaminated.

Families schedule a time, but if the nurse can't get away from another patient or is an emergency, it just all goes out the window.

So we're making due with what we have.

I'm FaceTiming families with my personal phone.

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