"I felt completely broken" - the former Sheffield ICU nurse with PTSD from the Covid frontline
Joe Pons Laplana's been opening up about his struggles with his mental health
Last updated 23rd Jun 2021
A former intensive care nurse, who worked on the Covid frontline in Sheffield during the height of the pandemic, tells us he "fell to pieces" because of the trauma of his experience.
In an broadcast exclusive, Joe Pons Laplana has been telling us how he got PTSD after working at the Hallamshire during the first and second waves of the virus.
He's recounted heartbreaking moments losing patients to coroanvirus, witnessing their final goodbyes to relatives over FaceTime, and told us he had a constant fear that he'd get infected himself.
The experience has scarred him so much that, after getting therapy, he was forced to quit nursing altogether.
Joe says it has been the hardest eighteen months of his life:
"The fear that going to work I may be next, the loneliness of some of the patients, the phone calls with the relatives saying goodbye to some of my patients...at the end I felt completely broken. I had panic attacks.
"Every patient I lost, they left a scar on my heart"
"People were dying and they were saying goodbye via Facetime. You know that may be the last conversation that they were having between each other - 50% of the people we're putting to sleep, they never wake up. Every patient that I lost, they left a scar on my heart because I throw 100% of my efforts behind them pulling through."
More than a thousand people in Sheffield have died of coronavirus, and many of them in the hospital Joe was working at.
He says the life and death pressure was a lot to deal with:
"Every day when you opened the double doors to the unit, you put on all the PPE. In a way it's like preparing to go to a war. Any mistake could have cost my life or the life of my patients.
"Any mistake could have cost my life or the life of my patients"
"A patient died who was a similar age to me and that hit me quite a lot. Because he had two daughters and I have two daughters also. Suddenly I heard the youngest daughter on the phone saying 'get well Dad, I love you'. That broke my heart because that was the final conversation they had - the dad passed away."
Reasearch suggests mental health problems more than quadrupled among NHS staff during the first wave of coronavirus.
In a survey last year the Royal College of Nursing found more than half of their members worried about their mental health as a result of Covid.
Joe says he got brilliant support from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust who provided him with counselling.
He's encouraging other healthworkers who are struggling to seek help too:
"We are not heroes, we are not angels, we are human beings. And every day the relentlessness of this pandemic has had an impact.
"Some of us are traumatised and we need to talk about it. Because I had mental health problems doesn't mean I'm a worse human being or a worse nurse or a worse husband. I just need time to recover.
"We need a bit of help to put our pieces back together and be able to function again. A lot of us, we're falling to pieces. I was in pieces at the end of the second wave. Through no fault of my hospital, no fault of my colleagues, but I was at the point where I was not coping any more."