 Hi guys and welcome back to my video. I haven't been on here in forever and I wanted to do a little update video on how things have been going here in Arizona, how work's been going, working in a COVID ICU and I'm also it's hard to tell but I am like 30 weeks pregnant right now while recording this video so I kind of have a lot to like update you guys on and talk about so I wanted to just do a brief update video for anyone who's interested or cares. If you follow me on my Instagram I've kind of updated a little bit about this already so you may have already seen that but okay where do we begin? A couple of weeks ago I actually went on light duty for work for my pregnancy and for a complication that I was having. If you want all the details I'll link like a full update video down below that's on my other channel but essentially what it came down to was I was like really overdoing it at work and I was starting to have like some changes in my body and cervix that were like kind of preterm labor so to speak and this was at 23 weeks pregnant which if you know that's like not where that's not the time you want to give birth and so after like finding this out my OB and I decided that light duty would be a good option and fortunately my workplace offers this. I know that so many of your guys' work like don't offer this so I'm very thankful that I can be doing this right now essentially I'm being a unit secretary on one of our ICU units and it actually worked out great because with COVID being so crazy in Arizona we had to make like several new ICUs and so we didn't have like unit secretaries for these new ICUs that we had made so I've been doing that for the last couple of weeks and it's really helped me just like take it easy I still am able to work and like get my hours and I'll have to burn through like PTO or take time off I'm not on bed rest any of that but I have been able to take it easy because prior to going on light duty I was getting my butt kicked at work and I know so many of you can relate with working in COVID units you know across the United States across the world even and we were getting annihilated here in Arizona as far as just a ton a ton of sick patients running out of resources and I was getting you know three very heavy patients in the ICU that were all like manually prone and invented and I just had I was overdoing it I wasn't able to eat enough or drink enough and as much as like I tried to like do those things it just wasn't like possible for me during those shifts and so I would go home and be like wow I'm like super crampy and I thought well I've just been on my feet all day it's probably that and then it turns out that I actually was like having some cervical shortening and funneling like internally if you're an OB person then maybe you know like what that is but luckily I've been on light duty and it's been nice and COVID is actually starting to like go down here in the state of Arizona which it's been so nice over the last couple weeks to see it we've closed two of our COVID ICUs and we're like having more normal nurse patient ratios not pairing like our one-to-one therapies like CRT and what not with other patients and so it's just been like kind of relieving to see that it is getting better and like we've been in the thick of it for so long and it just kept getting worse worse worse just so to see it getting better it's like awesome it's also kind of like eerie because we've been through this before where we had a surge we were really overwhelmed and then the surge like ended and we actually like had like no patients we were calling off nurses it was very weird and that's sort of kind of what's starting to happen now is that the other day we actually had to like say hey does anyone want to go home early so a nurse like got to go home early and um we have like empty rooms and it's just kind of like this eerie feeling of like okay this is nice and it's a nice break but is this like sustainable like are we going to continue to just like have reduced COVID patients or is this like another calm before the storm so i'm really hoping with the vaccine with you know just COVID literally infecting so many people here that we start to develop some sort of like herd immunity and that we don't see another one of these huge like surges i'm sure maybe we might have another little one i don't know but it's been crazy i want to make a video just sharing like COVID stories that things that i've experienced personally or other nurses have experienced in like my ICU unit because i have seen so much good and bad through the last couple of months like an overwhelming amount that i think it'd be nice to kind of document it and just be like i don't know these are some stories from working as a COVID ICU nurse obviously i want to like be HIPAA compliant and all that but i've just seen like some crazy things that in the moment i'm like this is this is crazy but then i go home and i'm like what what happened at work today um and it because we've just had such high acuity and so many of these patients it's like just astronomically astronomically just a ton of stories both positive and negative sad happy a mixture of all the emotions so if you're interested in that i think i want to do kind of like a COVID i don't know like a COVID wrap-up video because i know COVID's still going on but kind of like a COVID stories from an ICU nurse i don't know let me know if you're interested in that but that's um where i'm at i'm still on like duty i will probably be on my duty for another i don't know week or two i have another appointment with my OB coming up and i'm gonna see if i can get cleared to maybe go back um if it's gonna be safe also i'm hoping that with the numbers of COVID just being a little less and us having a little better staffing that i can at least like have a normal assignment and i don't like want to ask for favors just because i'm pregnant and whatnot but i do have to like look out for myself and this baby before everything else and i would tell anyone else that it's just hard to like live that for myself sometimes and i felt really guilty initially going on like duty because i saw all of my other nurses like still struggling and i was like sitting there on the computer not really i was being helpful in a different way just um it felt weird for me so okay that's my update i hope you guys uh enjoyed that and i'll see you in my next video bye