Year of the Nurse: A Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir

Cassandra Alexander

Jul 2021 · Cassie Alexander

About this ebook

This book is for anyone, nurse or otherwise, who is furious about how 2020 went down and—how 2021 is going.

On April 25th, 2021 at 10:55 in the morning I messaged my chat group of girlfriends from where I work as a nurse on an ICU floor: “Nothing like feeling strongly suicidal at a job where you’re supposed to be keeping people alive,” and then tweeted that my “mental health wasn’t great” and deleted the Twitter app off of my phone because I didn’t want to “overshare.”

           That I felt like dying.

           That I would’ve rather died than still be at work.

           I am not alone.

          In 2020 there were roughly four million nurses in America. Only 2.7 million U.S. soldiers fought in the Vietnam War. Those who came back from Vietnam, having witnessed atrocities—and in some cases, participated in them—were changed forever.

           You can’t send four million people into a wartime-equivalent situation without psychological consequences.

           And yet that’s what America has done.

           Nurses spent a year battling a largely unknown assailant. Running low on gear. Fearing we might bring something deadly home. Getting coughed on by people who pretended that our fights were imaginary, that our struggles—watching people die, day after day, no matter what we did—were literally fake.

           Nurses are scarred.

           And unless people understand what we went through and commit to never let anyone lie in the future about public health, we will never become whole.

Year of the Nurse: A Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir is Cassandra Alexander's poignant effort to come to grips with suicidal ideation and PTSD after being a covid nurse in an ICU in 2020. Comprised of original essays and her chronological journals, tweets, and emails as she attempted to save lives, including her own—this book will let you experience last year from the bedside.

Come and understand what it was like.

Ratings and reviews

A Chronological examination of Nursing behind the mask during the 2020-21 COVID-19 Pandemic Author Cassie Alexander’s book The Year of the Nurse is written using her Private Diary, Explanatory Essays, Personal Rants, Tweets, and Two Nurses Talking’s emails. Along the way are interspersed the evolving facts of the Pandemic, it’s spread, and public reactions. Heartbreaking and Horrifying to read. I received an advance copy from the author

I reached the end of this book and all I want to do is howl in grief for the way we, as human beings, failed one another, and continue to do so even to this day. I want to hug the author, and every other medical professional who has been in the trenches fighting to get us here as safely as possible. This was a very raw, somewhat unfiltered, look at the last year and a bit of the author’s life. It made me cry and it made me want to break fragile things. I don’t know what the pandemic still has in store for us, but I can only hope that we have learned our lessons and will do better in the future. Somehow, I have this terrible feeling I’m going to be disappointed. The human spirit is a resilient thing, and so I remain hopeful. I received a complimentary copy of this book through Booksprout.

Note: I received an advanced copy of this book. I read quickly, but not that quickly. And this is not a book to read quickly. Quite a few times, I put it down to put myself back in the moments described, guideposts for what experience of mine I could share with Cassie. While 2020 was hard for everyone, as every advertisement ever likes to remind us, it was disheartening, impossible, and deadly for nurses. Like Cassie says, you have to be a bit of a rubbernecker to be an ICU nurse, and similarly I was very interested in what her experience was- there was news coverage of what our "heroes" were doing in 2020, but not nearly enough, as she relates. This book is a textual scrapbook of her experience, from headlines to group chats to private journals. It was not always an easy thing to read, as someone who empathizes strongly with people, but it was a very important and enlightening thing to read. As we continue in the pandemic, as it turns bad again, anyone interested in reading this book will want to know this experience, this mindset. We're all so tired. But this perspective is so, so important. Even the "luckier" nurses, geographically, resource-wise, or administration-wise, were ground to the bone in 2020. We can't let them down, not when protecting them is so easy. Read the book. That's really, after 2020, watching the Delta variant numbers rising, that's all I've got.

About the author

Cassandra is an RN of 14 years, including burn, ambulance transport, and ICU experience, and a paranormal romance author.