Date Posted: October 8, 2026
On May 28, 2026, Avery Nennmann interviewed ICU nurse Robin Berry from San Angelo, Texas.
It was a war. And we were at the forefront, the front line of the war, and it hasn’t been recognized as one… when we’ve had a war, we have to debrief. And so, in World War II, the guys came home, and they made a lot of war movies so that people could understand what had happened. But [the COVID-19 pandemic] hasn’t been acknowledged as a war, and therefore we haven’t been able to debrief from it.
Robin Berry, a career ICU nurse in San Angelo, Texas, recalled the intensity of the first year of the pandemic, drawing a picture of camaraderie, battle, loss, and heroism – largely left behind by the general public. Her story began in Oklahoma City in early spring 2020 during a contract rotation. As the pandemic continued to spread, she moved down to San Angelo, where she battled the second surge in October of 2020 in her hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. Inside the 18-bed unit, “everybody was on a vent. And two patients to a room. And, um, no- nobody lived.”
Among the most difficult moments for Robin were interactions with patients’ family members. Many wanted what they thought of as the unvarnished truth—meaning, the prognosis or likelihood of recovery. Which was non-existent. She struggled with her inability to relay to them that no one was making it out of that ICU alive. They would then say, “Well, God’s gonna heal my loved one.” Or, admonishing her, “You need to be more positive,” refusing to acknowledge the futility of the moment and the reality of the patient being on a ventilator. Robin was the one who carried the burden of this knowledge.
Every day that Robin was in the ICU with her “infantry” of other nurses and physicians, she bore witness to death after death and the grieving families, separated from their dying loved ones by glass, iPad screens, and PPE. The community she served was largely Hispanic and Catholic, and she reflected on how her patients’ families were “demonstrative in their grief.” For example, on the last days of a patient’s life a family member, Robin explained:
… would be standing at the door, with their hands on the window, talking to their wife and saying the most beautiful and loving things, ‘You were the light of my life. Every day with you was fulfilling. I don’t know what I’m gonna do without you. You’re a wonderful mother. Your children love you.‘ It was heart-wrenching… every minute.
Amongst these heartbreaking moments were acts of defiance in which Robin’s patients and their families insisted on recognizing and lifting up the humanity of the dying—a common thread among the stories we have heard from other nurses in this project. In one instance, another nurse’s father was in the ICU, and she asked to give him a religious token, a ritual. In defiance and acknowledgment of her colleague’s hardship, Robin concocted a plan to provide her with the PPE to safely see her father in the ICU. Robin continues,
And so we did our little plan. And she came in, and she anointed him with oil and prayed for him, but he was not doing well, and I was afraid that he was gonna plummet quickly. And so, like, the only way to get family in there was to call the chaplain, and the chaplain had to make arrangements for them to come in. And so it took a long time. It was a Sunday. There was a chaplain on call. They weren’t in the building. It took a long time, and the patient got worse, and by the time the wife actually got there, he had coded and died. I mean, we were coding him. And she was outside watching us code him.
This moment for Robin, while it ended in another tragic death of a patient, was a moment of care, not only for the family, but for her own sanity and psychosocial well-being. The relentlessness of seeing patients die makes these instances of breaking from restrictions placed on nurses by the hospital, institutions, government, etc., all the more important for the sake of humanizing these ICU deaths and connecting loved ones to those who passed.
Not all moments of her time as an ICU nurse, however, were viewed as heroic. As we know from previous interviews, healthcare professionals were subjected to acts of violence, both physical and verbal. Robin’s ICU received death threats from the father of a young patient who passed,. It was serious enough to close the unit temporarily. There were even families who, because of their anti-vax beliefs, felt that the nursing staff were not taking good care of their family members.
I speak for nurses that I spoke with during that time, we’re in favor of being able to choose whether you receive a vaccine or not. We didn’t like being forced into having a vaccine if we had had the choice. But also, we would never change the way we provide care because of the way a person believed, especially about a vaccine. We did try.
He needed ECMO and we don’t have ECMO here, and we tried to get him accepted to a hospital, but nobody would accept him. And finally, we did get somebody to accept him, but the closest place that would accept him was in New Mexico, and he would have had to be on a fixed-wing flight. I took care of him that day. That’s the reason I know this part. For weeks, we tried to get him transferred out because [his family] didn’t think that we were doing a good job because he just kept going downhill and downhill and downhill.
I personally was working whenever he got accepted… he was too sick to transport. He would have died before he got to the plane. It looked like we didn’t do anything. It looked like we didn’t do the right thing on his behalf. It looked like we didn’t want him to live because he didn’t want take the vaccine. None of which was true.
The man ended up passing away. When I asked Robin what the hardest part about caring for COVID patients during this time was, she responded, “Hands down, everybody died.”
She could count the two or three people that lived, out of the entire 18-beds, two-patients-to-a-room ICU for the duration of that first year. She continued, “Everybody else died. Everybody else died. And we coded and coded and coded, and you wanted to say, ‘Please don’t make me do this again’ … not, not because you didn’t want them to live, not because you didn’t want to offer life-saving treatment if it were gonna, you know, help them. But, um, that hands down, everybody died.”
The metaphor of war and battle was consistent throughout Robin’s recollection of her time during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. When asked about her relationships with her fellow nurses, Robin explains that they were tight with one another because it felt like “literally being in the trenches.” They supported one another through dark humor and becoming trauma bonded. “So that camaraderie that was there is—and this is just common in nursing—is not the same as it was. Like men who go off to war, [it] won’t ever be that same.”
The memory of the COVID dead become embedded in the healthcare workers—they linger in their lives and the stories they tell. While the public has moved on (with some actively seeking to forget its tolls), the nurses and frontline workers do not have that luxury. Having repeatedly born witness to the suffering and passing of patients, many left the bedside and were diagnosed with PTSD. Hospitals became a war zone with civilians on the outside and healthcare workers fighting for the lives of loved ones and for themselves.
Who is left to mourn and remember the war inside hospitals during the pandemic? The experiences of healthcare workers, and even the COVID dead, we argue, are being forgotten as society moves on. Working in healthcare has become unbearable as hospitals face budget cuts and the public turns to anti-science/anti-vax propaganda. Robin herself remarked, “a lot of people that entered into nursing during that time, mm, promptly left, uh, a few years after.”
On a personal level, the pandemic still continues to affect Robin, “I feel like the main thing is that we all just [went], ‘Oh, it’s over. You don’t have to wear the mask anymore. You don’t have to wear the PPE anymore. It’s over. We’re gonna assign you your two patients now. No big deal. Everything’s fine.’ The lack of acknowledgment, I guess, of the war, you know, that happened, is the main—I think that’s the only—thing I carry.” Robin even admitted that she herself does not talk about the pandemic; it brings forth emotions that are best left in the past—to those charged moments, surrounded by loss, contention, and grief.
Looking to the future, technology and medicine may have changed, but the ethos of nursing has not. In Robin’s words, “It’s still connection with a patient who, and families, who are facing, especially in ICU, the worst days of their life. It’s still they don’t wanna really hear the truth. It’s still they get angry when you have to offer them something they didn’t want to have to make a decision about. It’s still, this patient needs a DNR, or this patient needs a spiritual consult, or how can we better accommodate them… I think that kind of care hasn’t really changed.” While nurses within healthcare may be fundamentally altered by the pandemic, nursing as a field of expertise will still be about the humans who rely on them as caregivers during tumultuous times. Nursing will always, at the heart of it, be about care, but the pandemic has forced nurses to feel that survival comes before care.
I don’t think that nursing is of the mindset that we’re like, ‘We’re just gonna forget it and go on.’ We feel forgotten. And look overlooked, but not by our choice. But our nature is to go on. With or without working through it.