Things that Have No Place in Medicine: Anti-mask edition

WHHHHHHYYYYYYY are we having to say this?!?!?!

So about a month ago, an Oregon nurse was put in leave, then fired after she posted a TikTok video about traveling maskless, encouraging play dates, etc. There was a tremendous backlash from Twitter users and the Internet sleuths found her real name and her job, and she was subsequently dismissed from her hospital. Also, she was an oncology nurse, which is just....so fucked.

Right after that this other idiot in Florida did the same thing, and get this, she was a PEDIATRIC nurse who worked with special needs and immunocompromised children. Same outcome. 

Now, pretty much everyone I know understands you can’t be a white supremacist in TikTok videos and keep your job unless you work in politics. The mask thing, that’s a bit different. I know people, people I’d normally look to as intelligent human beings, who just started wearing masks. Really. Medical people. And trust me, they have heard about it from me. Once someone was commented on a Facebook discourse they would wager I wasn’t such a mouthy bitch in person and they were promptly corrected by people who know me very well. 

Here’s the deal, folks. 

If you wear the title of nurse, doctor, respiratory therapist, ANY medical license, you are part of the public health team. That’s what you signed up for. There are all kinds of licenses and they include these neat things called Nurse Practice Acts and Hippocratic Oaths. Guess what? They all cite some form of conduct, which includes protecting the public. 

If you’re a part of our team, it’s your responsibility to support public health measures, which includes promoting public health guidelines that might save, oh, I don’t know, 350,000 some lives as of today. That’s doing no harm. When you’re promoting the opposite, you should absolutely be disciplined. You’re doing the opposite of what saves lives. 

Well, maybe oncology nurses aren’t really seeing the true effects of COVID, right? Maybe she just didn’t know....

Any social media site has thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe more, firsthand accounts of nurses, doctors, frontline workers telling you what actually is happening. There are patients in California waiting in ambulances for hours because there’s no available spaces. ER’s are treating people in hallways. Areas like waiting rooms and gift shops have been transformed into patient care areas. 

Do I agree with these nurses losing their jobs?

ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY.

Bye, Felicia. 

Because the mask thing has been politicized. And politics have no place in this. 

There’s these whole neat evidence based practice thing we use. Meaning our best practice is based on evidence. Scientific shit, you know? A couple months into this COVID thing, we all figured out it’s IMPERATIVE we fight to the very last second to keep patients off the ventilator, because once they were on, a lot of them weren’t coming off. We learned to pronate them early, that remdesivir was showing some promising early results, that high flow humidified oxygen with just that little bit of PEEP was helpful, and all of these things were based on OUTCOMES. Science shit again.

And science has proven that masks, social distancing, testing, and contact tracing is the way to decrease the spread of COVID and save everybody’s ass. By promoting the opposite, you’re violating that whole evidence based practice thing. 

Imagine if you came in, and were a patient, and you had chest pain. And instead of following the standard of EKG, Aspirin, Nitro, I decided you were probably NOT at risk of heart disease because you were young, and it was a waste of my time, and threw a Percocet in your mouth and told you to go home. 

Seems like I’d have violated a standard of care, right? 

Correct. I’d lose my license at the least.

Spreading anti mask rhetoric and being proud of it, no less, is also a violation of a public health standard of care. 

Like it or not, political or not, disagree with it or not, these are the rules, ok? I know if I get videoed threatening someone in Wal-Mart because they’re not wearing a mask, I am violating the agreement of my license. I can ask them politely to put it on. But I can’t threaten them (and I’m not the kind of person that threatens people, it’s just an example) and I can’t scream and cuss and act like a moron in public. 

So wear a fucking mask even if you don’t like it. Especially if you’re on TikTok.

Which I am. But in secret. You’ll never find me. 

Just kidding. There’s a bunch of videos my kid makes me do with her and I’m usually in pajama pants and they’re awful in a really hilarious way. 

And that’s the end of my TikTok firings chat!

— the Midwestern One