‘It’s just so much death’: El Paso nurse’s tweets about working with ICU Covid patients go viral

EL PASO, Texas -- After months of working through the Covid-19 pandemic, registered nurse Ashley Bartholomew decided it was time to leave.

"This is the most tragic, overwhelming, craziest thing I've ever experienced in my life," said Bartholomew. "Just every day is full of very sick patients, a ton of patients, just so many sick people that there's not really much that we can do for them and it's just so much death and it's just so sad."

A week ago Tuesday was her last shift at an El Paso hospital working in the Covid ICU. It was that day, she had an interaction with a Covid patient in the ICU that she called eye-opening.

She detailed the exchange on Twitter. It has now gone viral.

She said she was checking the glucose levels for the 25 patients in the Covid unit. Her last patients was awake and watching the news.

She tweets, "He mentions hating 'fake news'. He says, 'I don’t think Covid is really more than a flu.'"

Bartholomew said she was taken aback and decided to do something she's never done before.

She tweets, "I’m brutally honest. I tell him in 10 years of being a nurse I’ve done more CPR and seen more people die in the last two weeks than I have in my entire career combined."

A few hours later, she is wheeling him past all the other Covid patients to a lower level of care.

She says he then thanked her, tweeting, "Thank you for telling me what you told me. Thank you for being a good nurse and about me, I saw a lot of the other ones when you were wheeling me out of ICU. It’s much more than a flu, I was mistaken.”

Bartholomew described the conversation as eye-opening and said there is so much more work to do.