They Call Me Harriet

It all started February 2020 as a former chief nursing officer summoned to the oval office hallways for an emergency command meeting with all executives and division chiefs to launch an internal disaster command for preparation of a pandemic preparation of mass proportions. In this journey, this nurse leader crosses the lines from critical thinking into the twilight zones of care delivery where all conscious thinking and established processes of infection control are thrown out the window to relegate the masses of employees to batten down the hatches for full scale pandemic preparations. She shares accounts of things that just defied logic, her own battle being sequestered as a patient isolated from everyone, to the inconsistencies across the Nation in care delivery, and working often frontlines to ensure patients had the human connection from isolation to the depths of working behind the scenes underground connecting with physicians and people all over the Country and some around the world to find more purposeful, tested solutions to recovery of the virus away from hospitals and saving lives one person at a time. In a fight for her life to recover, she quickly found resources across the globe to connect with to improve her health and share with others. Sad and tragic, she shares accounts of a few patients she touched directly to intervene to help and at least they did not all die alone. In this account one must consider why did fear overlay facts, and why was the implicit orders to use only one method, one protocol, when for years and so many other circumstances could medications be used for off-label use, and why now was it impossible to get things off store shelves, yet this Country cannot seem to get control of Fentynal abuse. It will leave you to wonder why so few challenged, and why so many died, and why now it is so important to consider how and why we let this happen?