Melanie Allen Photo: Courtesy of Sanford Health
FARGO, N.D. (KFGO/KVRR) – After a year of helping patients fight COVID-19, medical professionals are dealing with their own mental health concerns.
“The first few weeks were terrifying,” recalls Sanford Health nurse Melanie Allen.
She has been a nurse for nearly 15 years, but part of what prepared her for working inside the COVID-19 unit wasn’t her medical experience.
“I’m shaking thinking about it now,” she said with trembling hands, remembering her time as a volunteer firefighter.
Allen says her volunteer firefighting experience gave her the mental strength to deal with the day-to-day struggles of helping COVID patients in the Sanford ICU every day.
“I feel like that prepared me for what I walked into.”
“Every time you turned around, an alarm on one of those monitors was going off. Somebody wasn’t doing well, somebody needed to be intubated, there was a code, there was 12 hours of nonstop insanity,” Allen remembered. “The death and the destruction that we saw in human bodies from it, that’s going to leave a scar.”
Sandford Health & the North Dakota Department of Human Services created a resource called Reach For Resilience to help healthcare workers with their mental scars. Allen says that has helped her tremendously.
“I know I was okay, but I have the support and the family and the friends that I can reach out to when I’m not doing so great about things mentally. Does everybody have that? Do they have the ability to say, ‘You know what, this is too much I need help,’” said Allen.
A year ago, Allen cared for the first COVID-19 patient at Sanford Health.
You can call the Reach for Resilience helpline at 701.365.4920.
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