While you’d have a hard time finding someone who hasn’t been affected by the pandemic, it’s even harder to think of a group the last year and a half has taken a heavier toll on than health care workers.
Because while many fell over themselves to call them heroes last year, little has been done to alleviate the way their already tough working conditions spiralled out of control in that time.
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And as one story illustrates, our actions can speak a lot louder than our words when it comes to how we appreciate medical professionals.
On August 27, a Boston doctor named Emily Long posted a video to TikTok in which she asked others what they were turned away from because the work in health care.
And from a question like that, it didn’t exactly take a genius to figure out that we caught her on a very frustrating day.
As she explained, “I was supposed to fly out straight from a 28-hour shift to attend one of my best friends’ big wedding event that I spent thousands of dollars on and took my vacation time (which is very limited) off to attend.”
But on the morning before she was supposed to attend, she texted the friend to tell her about the testing and other precautions she had just undergone, she found herself uninvited.
As she said, this message was meant to be comforting to her friend but she apparently had a panicked reaction to the fact that she takes care of “sick people.”
In Long’s words, “Who would have thought that a doctor takes care of sick people?”
As we can see in the full video, this left her with a non-refundable plane ticket to Austin, Texas that she no longer had a use for.
She asked if anyone there wanted to hang out, but far more people apparently sent messages taking her up on that than she expected.
But as she explained in a follow-up video, she wouldn’t be heading to Texas after all.
This meant that she’d just have to accept the money she spent as credit towards a future flight, but it also meant that she was back at work.
She explained the weekend duties are rotated among ICU staff in a specific on-call system and that finding a replacement for her in the weekend she was going to take off would have cost her workplace $2,800. So she decided to work as initially scheduled instead.
Still, she appreciated the thousands of offers she received and promised she would visit Texas when the high rates of COVID-19 cases subside.
Funnily enough, she also mentioned that the people who were apparently so scared of having her around saw nothing wrong with taking maskless photos at a bar in a hot spot for the virus.
As she put it, “So they had just as much exposure to COVID-19 as I did.”
I guess it’s good to know who your real friends are.
Last Updated on September 7, 2021 by Mason Joseph Zimmer
