The Effects of Frontline
By Emerson White
It was yet another humid, spring day in Atlanta. At the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the Delta Air Lines team was pre-briefing for a 10-hour flight to Rome. Flight attendant, Robbie Doctrow, had prepared for this same flight dozens of times in her 30-year plus career, but this preparation was different.
As an international flight attendant, one of the biggest perks of her job was the layovers. To a traveling passenger, a long layover can be the most dreadful part of flying. However, for Robbie, a two-day layover meant she got to stay in a suite in Italy for the night and explore all Rome had to offer. But this flight took place in the first week of March in 2020.
Doctrow’s Italian-based colleagues who regularly work the flights to and from Rome informed her that restaurants, tourist attractions, and even some hotels were all being shut down due to what was being called Covid-19. After the briefing, the flight went on as usual. Doctrow spent her layover in Rome before returning to the airport for her next flight. She flew from Rome to Costa Rica where she stayed for three days.
By the time she left Costa Rica, on March 8th, fears surrounding the new Coronavirus began to surge, and Doctrow began to question the safety of international travel. She sanitized her hands, wiped down her section of the plane and personal belongings with disinfectant.
Nearly four and a half hours later, she landed safely in Lexington, Kentucky. The passengers exited the plane as she finished her post-flight duties. Finally, she drove home to the comfort of her own bed after a long week of traveling.
Doctrow never imagined this would be her last flight with Delta. Like millions of Americans, she suddenly learned she was something called an “essential worker.” And behind that lofty title, there was this reality: Essentially, she didn’t have many options.
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Just three days later, on March 11, 2020, President Donald Trump announced a ban on all travel to and from Europe. As thousands of American citizens scrambled to find flights home, Doctrow began to worry and knew the travel ban did not bode well for the airline industry. With such little information being known about the Coronavirus, she was not worried about flying, but she was, “worried about the security of [her] job and flights being cut.”
Doctrow loved her work. It allowed her to create a career out of traveling the world. From March to April of 2020, she stayed home in part due to travel restrictions and also out of caution. By May Delta had cut back on international flights and wanted Doctrow to return to flying domestic.
Throughout her years working in the airline industry, Doctrow learned the parts of the jobs she loved and the parts she hated. Flying domestic was at the top of her cons list.
After a 34-year career as a flight attendant, she saw how the pandemic created a wall between her passion and her job. The biggest challenge for Doctrow, “was accepting how drastic the change in my job would be if I chose to return,” she said. Mentally, the most difficult part of the entire pandemic was giving up the job she had loved for so long.
She weighed the pros and cons of continuing with Delta in her head for weeks. The conclusion she came to was not one she wanted to admit, but she, “knew it would not be the same job again for a long, long time.”
Working on the frontline amidst a global pandemic presented challenges essential workers could have never predicted. For Doctrow the extent of these challenges was so severe she chose to retire from her lifelong profession and passion.
Across the nation, American’s lost their jobs due to stay at home orders, strict Covid guidelines, and a struggling economy. As millions filed for unemployment, restaurant employees, public transit workers, grocery store clerks, and healthcare professionals all stepped up in this time of crisis.
Essential workers have been called “heroes” throughout this pandemic, and rightfully so. They have been in the spotlight for over a year now, but how are these workers coping with the stresses and frustrations they have faced on the frontline. These people have been working tirelessly for months and were often isolated, as they have been the most at risk to exposure of Covid-19.
As they have continued to make heroic actions since March of 2020, they have also faced internal battles. Essential workers have experienced the emotional effects of the pandemic unlike anyone else.
As Doctrow faced the end of her career, Mary Austin Hacker’s had only just begun.
In November of 2018, just six months after graduating from the University of Georgia with a Mathematics degree and receiving her EMT certification, Hacker began a new job as an emergency care technician for the emergency services department. She commutes each day from Athens to Northside Gwinnett Hospital in Lawrenceville, Georgia. The hospital is the only one serving Gwinnett county’s million-plus population.
Hacker has been inundated with patients since March and has faced obstacles and hurdles she never envisioned. “Lord so much has changed,” she said when discussing the transition from March of 2020 to March of 2021. This year has not been an easy one for her, especially due to the high volumes of patients she saw. She noted that by the end of April of 2020, cases continued to rise, and “there started to be a delay in patient care that was just overwhelming.”
Each day, Hacker arrived to work ready to save lives. Yet each day she was also faced with impossible choices. Choosing whether to tend to the 20-year-old boy with his fibula piercing through his leg or assist the 80-year-old woman who was gasping for oxygen.
No matter her choice, she was often interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a heart monitor followed by the phrase, “check patient.” This noise meant one of her patients had gone into cardiac arrest. Covid-19 is primarily a respiratory illness that greatly affects the heart and lungs. According to Hopkins Medicine, the virus causes inflammation in the lungs which means less oxygen can reach the bloodstream. This eventually causes severe heart damage due to lack of oxygen and can ultimately result in cardiac arrest.
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A year into the pandemic, one of Hacker’s friends asked her what it was like to watch a critically ill patient die right in front of her. Hacker struggled for the words to tell him: Covid had forced her to endure that kind of awful trauma with numbing frequency – in some cases multiple times a day. “It’s been an emotional rollercoaster,” she says.
She knew that death was a part of the job description when she entered the field of medicine, but she never could have predicted the rate at which she would see it take place.
Hacker was not the only one struggling with the effects of isolation. Throughout the pandemic, frontline workers have been among the most vulnerable groups at risk for mental health problems. According to a recent systematic review of 55 studies looking at the psychological impact of Covid-19 and other epidemics on frontline health care workers experience psychological impacts of epidemics in higher frequencies than the average person.
Elsevier's public health emergency collection noted that the most common psychiatric disorders associated with epidemics were post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression, and anxiety. The intense workload healthcare workers are under has resulted not only in psychiatric disorders, but they have also faced physical symptoms throughout the pandemic.
The review noted that 42 percent of frontline nurses identified with symptoms such as headaches, throat pain, and lethargy. These physical symptoms were then significantly associated with psychological outcomes that included sleep disorders such as insomnia.
Mary Austin's mother Shelley Hacker, initially worried most about her daughter’s safety working in an environment with so much sickness. Yet as the pandemic wore on, she became more concerned with the toll of social isolation on Mary Austin. While this pandemic has been a time of seclusion for most, when paired with ever-evolving hospital regulations and witnessing new tragedies daily Shelley said, “I really saw the stress meter for my daughter go off the chart.”
In an interview with the Yale School of Medicine, Ph.D. Student Rachel Hennein noted the massive strain that has been placed on the healthcare industry in the wake of Covid-19. She said that this strain has, “ended up trickling down to the health care workers.” Both Hennein and the healthcare review previously mentioned emphasized that the need to manage these emerging mental health issues among health care workers during this pandemic is imperative, and as a country, we must find ways to help them.
However, healthcare workers are not the only people on the frontline facing these emotional effects. While their struggles are incomparable, they must not diminish the frustrations of restaurant workers, grocery store employees, and many others.
Sabrina Salov is a student at Brandeis University and worked as a waitress for Molti on Moody, an artisan deli and restaurant in Waltham, Massachusetts. Sabrina was hired in July of 2020, four months into the pandemic. Salov and the manager of Molti both hoped she could work full-time, but with the uncertainty the pandemic presented for the restaurant industry her job was never stable.
As the pandemic posed many challenges to higher education, Salov like many other college students across the country chose to take off the 2020 fall semester. A key factor in this decision was the income she expected to make from her job at Molti on Moody. Salov requested to work eight hours a day Monday through Friday yet was only getting staffed four to six hours a week. The restaurant cut back their hours from 9 am to 10 pm every day of the week to only five hours each day.
Each week, Salov left work, “frustrated not only by the limited hours but also due to the people and the environment,” she was working in. Salov was led to believe she would be working more hours and making additional tips, and when she was not, she faced financial and emotional burdens. She knew that her fellow coworkers were struggling financially due to the lack of hours and didn’t want to add more stress by taking hours away from them.
As the newest hire of the restaurant, Salov was under constant pressure working alongside a staff that had been there for over two years. Combine that pressure with the increased national stress level the pandemic and the 2020 election had created, and Salov became inundated with anxiety.
Sabrina was met with new tensions each day at work and was continuously bringing these frustrations home with her. She discussed her constant worries about hours, the restaurant’s stability, and the larger effects of the pandemic on small businesses.
After five months at Molti, Salov realized that she had lost her, “sense of purpose and the drive to be there,” and as winter approached the restaurant struggled with indoor seating guidelines. When the restaurant transitioned from patio seating to indoor-only dining, the business they were getting was even more limited than it had been in the warmer summer months.
Salov said the hardest part of her job was never knowing if she was going to have a good day at work. She felt constant pressure and said, “it was extremely difficult going into work each day when I knew I was struggling personally and couldn’t let that show to the customers I was serving.”
Her daily experience at her job relied heavily on if she had positive customer and employee interactions. When she had to deal with inconsiderate customers and abrasive colleagues, she left work mentally exhausted on top of feeling physically drained from a long day of waiting tables.
She noted that throughout this strenuous time, “patience, kindness, and understanding have never been more important because everyone is struggling.” Salov also discussed that having a strong support system at home was vital throughout this otherwise difficult period in her life.
Regardless of the field, essential workers have stepped up in a time of national crisis. These workers have saved countless lives and been there at a time when the country needed them most. Whether it was a nurse performing CPR on a patient, or a grocery clerk ensuring that a customer had food to get them through the next two weeks at home, each task performed was critical in this unprecedented time.
Frontline workers have gone above and beyond, and the emotional effects they are experiencing are merely a testament to the astounding work they have performed in this past year. They have done more than just their part, and now the nation must acknowledge and support them through the mental health challenges they are facing.
Works Cited
Kristoffersen, M. (2020, November 11). For Many Frontline Health Workers, COVID-19 Comes with an Emotional Toll. Yale School Of Medicine. Retrieved May 1, 2021, from https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/28589/
Cabarkapa, S., Nadjidai, S. E., Murgier, J., & Ng, C. H. (2020). The psychological impact of COVID-19 and other viral epidemics on frontline healthcare workers and ways to address it: A rapid systematic review. Brain, behavior, & immunity - health, 8, 100144. Retrieved April 24 2021, from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbih.2020.100144