Nice to see a nurse admit the truth about what the I.C.U. often is like and our hospital system in general:

[.... During her three months at Stony Brook, Ms. Fink sometimes had more patients than felt safe. I.C.U. care grew to seem “futile.” Because of the pain patients experienced from hands-on care and being on ventilators, she described herself as “a human torture device.” She knew that her care physically hurt patients and, in her experience, offered little benefit: “Most of the patients I didn’t see getting better.”

[....]

I’ve worked as a nurse for a decade and written about what my fellow nurses experience on the job. I worry for America’s nurses, and I am angry. The problems they face are inflicting a deep and lasting wound. For Ms. Fink, it all came to be too much. Now, almost eight months after leaving Stony Brook, she no longer wants to work in the I.C.U. and is studying to become a nurse practitioner. “I’m going into primary care to keep people out of the hospital,” she said [....]

Covid has only made a bad situation way worse. They are all past burn out. Mho, best to stay out of being an inpatient at a hospital if you at all possibly can for the foreseeable future; forget that elective surgery.