Cambodian American ICU Nurse Faces ‘Toughest’ Times During COVID-19

Vannthath Man, whose nickname is Mitch, came to the United States when he was about 12 years old. Now forty-two, he works for Inova as a nurse. Inova is a large healthcare facility located in Northern Virginia, and they own five hospitals here; Loudoun hospital, Mount Vernon hospital, Alexandria hospital, Fair Oaks hospital and the mothership that he normally works at is Fairfax hospital. He has been a nurse for 15 years and according to him, it is not an easy job. During the pandemic, the difficulty levels quadrupled for nurses at that time. Normally as an intensive care nurse (ICU), you take care of one or two patients but when the pandemic hit the epi center in Mount Vernon, he was taking care of over six to eight patients and supervising about four or five nurses who did not have ICU experience and that was very tough. Sometimes, he felt very unsafe.

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Patients got sick. It seemed like every time someone got ventilated you know they are going to die from it. The success rate was only about 10% at that time, so you could understand the death rate was high. It was so much that I lost track of how many died. The experience left him very lonely. His mom and dad passed away and there was no infrastructure to see them on video at that time. I remember one day I came in you know i was team lead at that time. He had four extremely sick COVID patients who were ventilated and had multiple high-risk medication and eventually by the end of the day four of them passed away. That was the lowest part of his career. He left Cambodia at an incredibly early age with his parents and came to the United States. It was tough for him as he did not speak the language, did not dress as they did, could not understand their jokes, he looked like an outcast.

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He said, initially, when people ask him what he wants to become in future, he never really had any goal because that was the least of his worries. His goal was to be safe when he gets to United States, to fit in, to have a good relationship with everybody, to succeed and to be successful. At certain times, he was bullied while in school at he started developing suicidal thoughts. It was a weekly recurrence for him because the abuse and the bullying were so much. He never really opened himself to anyone when he was younger, as he did not have the confidence to tell anyone. Every day, while in the bathroom, he would cry while taking a shower or while in bed. Many times, he could not go to sleep because he was crying, and this made him not want to go to school the next day. He became a strong person because of that and then he also thought if someone had helped him at that time, he would not have suicidal thoughts, he would not have had to go through such a challenging time. This is why he decided to become a nurse because he wanted to help people. By teaching them how to cope with anxiety, it helps them to cope and makes them feel at ease. This makes him immensely proud.