The Quiet Exit
This is a personal reflection on my experience working in critical care during the pandemic, and the path that followed.
It’s not about convincing anyone of anything. This essay is just my attempt to put words to something that felt hard to carry. And maybe loosen the grip of the shame that comes from not quite fitting in where you thought you would.
“Oh, you’re a nurse? Do you work at the hospital?”
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been asked that question.
And my answer is always the same:
“Not anymore, but I used to.”
I offer it with a smile; light enough to keep things casual, reassuring enough to confirm that yes, I’m a real nurse. You can almost see the relief settle over them, like the ghost of my hospital badge grants me a kind of unspoken legitimacy.
Because hospital nursing carries a certain kind of weight. And honestly, can you blame them?
Even Nurse Jackie, as fucked up as she was, was still the protagonist. And what does the public really know about nursing, beyond shows like Grey’s Anatomy or The Pitt? People picture a woman with a ponytail, in scrubs and cute white clogs. A stethoscope slung effortlessly around her neck, always knowing exactly what to do.
I wanted to be her, too. A critical care nurse. The Navy SEAL version of nursing, in my mind. So I worked my ass off and got hired in critical care.
I dove in headfirst: ACLS, PALS, NRP, Critical Care Certification. I was in codes, reading ECGs, managing ventilators, and titrating pressors. Learning to care for some really sick people, and I. Fucking. Loved. It. The constant drive to learn more, be better, move faster. All while working alongside sharp, driven, brilliant people. You know, the type A’s, with their labelled lines, home-cleaning schedules, and meal prep calendars. The people I wanted to be like.
And not just that, I was starting to make friends. We were new to this small town, and most people already had their people. And me? I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, so it had a familiar edge to it, like high school, in a way. The underlying desire to fit in.
But there’s something about working shoulder to shoulder trying to keep people alive, 12+ hours at a time, shift after shift. It peels people back, layer by layer. During downtime, we’d talk. Swap stories. Laugh hard. Have the kind of real, meaningful conversations I’d been craving. And somewhere in there I started to feel like I was just on the cusp of belonging.
Then COVID hit.
At first, it felt like I was the only one paying close attention. My boyfriend-now-husband and I were scouring YouTube and Twitter, watching the headlines, trying to take in as much information as we could. I brought it up cautiously at work. I didn’t want them to think I was wearing a tinfoil hat. By February 2020, I asked our infection control lead if I should be wearing a mask. She laughed. Probably thought I was overreacting. Three weeks later, everything changed.
Lockdowns. Cancelled surgeries. Deserted waiting rooms. I keep thinking back to those early conversations. “Where did all the sick people go?” I’d ask my colleagues. “Did people suddenly stop having MIs and strokes?” An eerie quiet settled in, like the hospital was holding its breath. I don’t do well with unknowns, and the suspense was getting to me. Nobody wanted to be there, myself included.
Then came the fear. Stories out of New York, nurses getting sick, some dying alongside their patients, reusing the same PPE for days. Even in our small-town hospital, it felt like we were bracing for a tsunami.
Management kept telling us we’d have enough PPE. But suddenly, we went from tossing surgical masks and N95s after EVERY patient encounter to wearing them for an entire shift. You’d see a table in the storage room-turned-lunchroom with paper towels neatly folded, each one labelled with a nurse’s name, a mask perched on top.
So we started placing orders with start-ups for N95-type respirators. Honestly, they kind of looked like a jock strap for your face. They arrived and barely fit anyone. Another flop.
But there were small wins. Bruce Power donated respirators to the hospital, and all of a sudden, every single nurse I worked with had one. We got fit tested and wiped those things down every chance we got. You’d finish a shift with barely any voice left, after twelve hours of yelling so people could hear you behind that giant plastic mask. But at least you didn’t have to take your N95 home, put it in a paper bag, and stick it in the oven overnight to try to “sterilize” it.
It’s strange what comes back when you start writing.
I remember our “Christmas trees,” IV poles stacked with infusion pumps. Intensivists quietly humming Baby Shark while we proned patients. The sound of the fans on the back of those big white hazmat suits as respiratory therapists approached. Hand signals through negative-pressure room windows. IV extension tubing everywhere. And those cordless phones we bought to “improve communication” that never really worked.
Patients coasting on vents for weeks, not improving, only to die after everything we tried to keep them alive.
The smell of HP wipes lingering inside my mask still hits like a reflex whenever someone mentions the hospital. Even now, writing this, I can taste it in the back of my throat.
Most people talk about the pandemic like it was some kind of strange time warp. And I get it. But there was no time warp in healthcare. No CERB. No binge-watching shows. No eating home-made sourdough. No working remotely from makeshift kitchen table setups. Just platitudes on network television, fire truck drive-bys, and restaurants sending free food to their healthcare heroes.
We were exhausted and scared. Whether we said it out loud or not, it was getting to all of us.
Then we started hearing about a vaccine. At first, it felt like hope. Maybe there was a way out of this. Our team was offered it early. I watched colleagues head down to the cafeteria clinic, ready for anything that might bring this to an end.
And me?
I didn’t get it.
We were trying to conceive, and I didn’t want to take any chances. Spoiler, I was already pregnant. I just didn’t know it yet. I’m trained to weigh risk and benefit, and I couldn’t justify saying yes without long-term data. Not during pregnancy. Not without more information.
At first, no one said much. Or maybe they did, just not to my face. Time went on, and people were burned out and brittle. We were all tired, afraid, and fraying.
One day, while sitting with my lunch propped up on my pregnant belly, a colleague dropped her lunchbox onto the table and said, “Those fucking unvaccinated idiots.”
The words hit hard and hung there. No one flinched, except for me.
“I’m one of those people,” I said quietly.
She blinked and gave me a tight smile. “Well, you’ll get it once the baby’s more cooked, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”
I didn’t want a fight. I just wanted to finish my meal and get through my shift. But I understood the fear. And I understood the anger.
When you’ve spent months watching people struggle to breathe, watching numbers tank, watching the world open and close again, it makes sense that you’d cling to whatever felt like a way out.
I went on maternity leave a few weeks before the vaccine mandate came down at my hospital. We had a beautiful baby girl. We nested. We exhaled for the first time in a long time. For a moment, life felt simple again. But the choice lingered in the background: Get the shot or lose my job.
I wanted time. More data. And honestly, somewhere inside, I kept thinking that it couldn’t actually happen. Surely someone would say this is too far. Surely everything we gave, everything we risked, will count for something. They won’t actually fire me if I don’t get these shots.
When people ask why I left critical care, I usually give them the easy version. Two kids. Shift work. A management position that made more sense. Better hours, better pay. It’s not a lie. It’s just not the whole truth. And honestly, it’s easier that way. It saves people the discomfort of having to figure out how to exit a conversation with someone they now might see differently.
I was at the hospital recently with my son. We were sitting in a small room just off the nursing station. I could hear the rhythm of the ED on the other side of the wall: the monitors, the rolling carts, the voices speaking in that shorthand language of vitals, diagnoses, medications, imaging.
And boy, did my heart ache.
I miss it. The urgency. The stakes. The codes. The competence. The way we moved into crisis together, like a flock of birds, shifting direction without words. Feeling like I was part of something good.
But you know what I don’t miss? The fear. The anxiety. The unknown. Knowing that no matter how good you are, and no matter how much you care, it can still be taken away. Not because you’re incompetent, or because you hurt someone. But because you made a decision and stood behind it.
And then there’s the shame wrapped around all of it.
I know I did nothing wrong. And given the chance, I’d make the same decision again in a heartbeat. But I didn’t want to stand out by causing trouble. I didn’t protest or file a lawsuit. Hell, I didn’t even tell some of my closest friends! I was too afraid of what they might think. So I kept my head down and slipped away as quietly as I could.
Life moved on around me. Policies shifted. People changed jobs. New nurses came and went. The world quietly rewrote its own story about those years.
I kept working in management in long-term care and began a Master of Nursing: Nurse Practitioner program. And now I sit in lectures and watch the pandemic reduced to three bullet points on a slide:
Did we achieve herd immunity?
Short answer: no.
We got the biology right. We got the sociology wrong.
And sometimes, sitting there while a professor clicks past those three bullets, I want to email him and say it was more complicated than that. But I don’t. Not because I’m unsure of my story, but because I know how fragile this profession can be and how quickly one misunderstood sentence can change the way someone sees you.
So I take notes and memorize what will be on the exam. And then I come home and write in places like this.
And the truth is, this still isn’t over for me.
I recently secured my second clinical placement for my NP program. And while the government says mandates are gone, individual organizations still get to decide. Which means the hospital, and even my local family health team, still require it.
So it still shapes things. What doors are open, and which ones close before I even knock. My options are limited. But not nonexistent.
And in the places where I have landed, I’ve found others like me. Not many. But they’re there. We don’t really talk about it, but there’s an unspoken understanding.
And maybe that’s why I need to tell this story.
Not to defend, or persuade, or rewrite what happened, but because I don’t want what happened to disappear into the version of the story we tell now.
I don’t want us to forget the nurses who vanished quietly. The ones who kept showing up, sealed into masks and gowns. The ones who held up iPads for final goodbyes, then drove home in the dark, stripped in their garages, and cried in their showers.
The ones who made a choice that changed everything.
They didn’t stop caring. And they sure as hell didn’t stop being nurses.
They just learned how to exit quietly and carry it with them.
And sometimes, that part of it shows up in small moments, like when someone asks,
“Do you work at the hospital?”
Loved this