‘Everybody Just Breathe’: A St. Paul nurse’s pandemic memoir

Molly Guthrey, Pioneer Press
·7 min read

Spring 2020: “I am at work when I learn the pandemic is coming our way … I learn that we are creating a COVID unit out of what is normally our Neuro ICU. I sneak upstairs to look and am met with plastic barriers and sounds of construction. They are knocking holes in the walls … Hospitals do not build things just for fun. They do not spend money lightly. They certainly do not create new units on a whim. Quickly and quietly, our facility was preparing for a storm, and we were all about to be caught in the downpour. And now we are here, and the rain is starting.”

— Amanda V. Peterson, “Everybody Just Breathe: A COVID Nurse Memoir of Stamina and Swear Words” (Beaver’s Pond Press, 2022)

Amanda Peterson wasn’t trying to write a COVID memoir.

At first, the critical-care nurse at Allina Health United Hospital in St. Paul was writing as a form of self-care.

“Paper therapy,” she called it.

“Most entries were written in the parking garage of the hospital,” said Peterson, 39, of Hudson, Wis. “I was trying to get all the feels out before I had to do it all over again. Some were written on the back of my checkbook. It was just pouring out of me.”

The notes scribbled in the corners have now been transferred to pages: “Everybody Just Breathe: A COVID Nurse Memoir of Stamina and Swear Words” was published by Beaver’s Pond Press in March, providing a glimpse into the life of a COVID ICU nurse in the early days of the pandemic.

May 2020

On the TV:

‘The more we get together, together, together, the happier we’ll be.’

Kid 1: Well, that’s a terrible song for right now.

Me: Wha — oh, dang, you’re right.

— Amanda Peterson, “Everybody Just Breathe”

Every January, Peterson goes through her family’s photos from the previous year to create a photo album for herself and her husband, Collin, and their two children, who are now 6 and 9.

In January 2021, she realized that their 2020 album was going to tell a much different story from other years. Gone were the usual family vacations and get-togethers; instead, there were lockdowns, learning at home and long ICU shifts. It was a pandemic diary, some of it in photos, some of it in social media posts that ranged from explanations about why people should wear masks to funny kid quotes, shared in a distinctive voice that uses humor for levity and swear words for stress relief.

“My mom said, ‘Maybe you should put your writings in there, too,'” Peterson recalls of the annual album.

She did — and was surprised at how much she had to say.

“It was 75 pages in a Word document,” she says. “I emailed it to two local publishers with a note that said, ‘I was a COVID nurse and this year was bananas, does anyone want to bind this?’ I thought I’d create a memory book and put it away. They both emailed me back — they wanted the rest of the story.”

Peterson ended up working with Beaver’s Pond Press, a St. Paul-based publishing house that helps authors shape and publish their work.

Her submission stood out.

“Our team member who looks over our submissions dropped us a note to say that there was a new book coming that they couldn’t put down,” says Becca Hart, the publisher’s operation manager, in an email.

How did they describe it?

“‘Tough, gripping and well-written,'” Hart says.

Kerry Stapley was the book’s editor.

“One of the goals while shaping this memoir was to create a book that everyday readers would find heartening, fascinating, funny and informative while also prioritizing other COVID nurses in her readership,” Stapley writes in an email. “It was important to Amanda that the memoir be an act of camaraderie and gratitude to her fellow nurses.

“I think part of what makes this memoir so unique is that it insists upon the humanity of a group of people who, despite being on the frontlines of COVID, were also rendered somewhat invisible during COVID’s politicalization. When she describes losing patients by day, then driving past people who are queueing up outside bars on her way home, the maddening surrealism of her lived experience becomes palpable.

“And yet, the same principles that led Amanda to nursing — the compulsion to universally love and care for her fellow man — also steer this memoir. In our polarized society, Amanda’s memoir is the only COVID document I have come across that I think could be cherished by people on both sides of the political divide.”

“Jack … Jack is fake, but his stories are real. Jack is every patient we’ve had for eleven months. Jack is every COVID patient across the globe. Jack is everyone … Jack is a twentysomething who just had a heart attack from this virus. Jack is a fortysomething whose kids are home alone because both parents are now in the hospital. Jack is a friend’s mom. Jack is pregnant with her first child, fighting for two. Jack is a little grandpa, married forty years to the little grandma two rooms down. Jack is hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of stories.”

— “Everybody Just Breathe” by Amanda V. Peterson

To abide by privacy policies and regulations, Peterson created a patient called Jack in her memoir. Jack is symbolic of all COVID patients everywhere. Jack is the sole patient mentioned in Peterson’s 261-page book.

“Jack is a mish-mash of everybody,” she says. “I varied genders and scenarios to keep it as generic as possible.”

By protecting her patients in the hospital, her patient on paper became more than a writing challenge for the author — he was an epiphany.

“It became poignant,” she said. “Jack could have been everybody … Jack could be any of us.”

April 20, 2020: “Wednesday evening. Normally, a Wednesday would entail me picking up Kid 2 from wrap care, rushing home to meet Kid 1 getting off the bus, cramming in homework while throwing a snack at both kids, and getting Kid 1 dressed to get to dance class by five o’clock … Today, we did school from home and went outside to fly kites in the crazy wind. We drew with chalk on the sidewalk. I took a nap while they had an afternoon movie. And then, after a family dinner, we got on our bikes, and all four of us took a bike ride to get ice cream at the gas station.”

Peterson’s husband was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, undergoing major surgery. By the start of 2020, the family was ready to get back to normal.

“We had literally declared 2020 ‘Our Year,'” Peterson says.

Instead, it was COVID-19’s year: The kids were home from school while her husband managed his rain gutter business and Peterson stepped up at the hospital.

“I volunteered on day one,” she says of serving in the COVID ICU. “This is what I trained for.”

The family upped her life insurance, and carried on.

“My husband was a huge supporter of mine,” she says of that time.

“I don’t think I realized how stressed she was about everything,” he says of her fears about the virus, “until I read the book.”

August 2020: “Gosh, I miss my church. I could use some church right now. There is a lot of talk about church lately, and how opening churches is so important, almost like we should feel guilty for keeping them closed. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent many a sabbath day within the walls of a hospital, but I’ve accepted that church isn’t in a building right now. At work, I feel God everywhere. He is there when we’re laying hands on the sickest of His people. He is there when I hold their hand as their soul quietly deprts, beyond where I can see. He is with me all the time.”

— “Everybody Just Breathe” by Amanda V. Peterson

Think back to the early days of the pandemic — people were dying, nursing homes were in lockdown, school was canceled, people were losing their jobs, store shelves were empty. There weren’t enough ventilators and there were no vaccines; the unknown was frightening.

Where did one find solace in such a world?

For this nurse, faith helped.

“I have always been a fairly spiritual person,” says Peterson. “But I never realized how big faith was to me until I needed it — until the world was falling apart. You had to find something to cope, like nature. I found solace in trees and Jesus and swearing.”

“Yesterday, I was told I shouldn’t share close-up pictures of myself in my respirator because they are ‘scary’ and ‘uncomfortable.’ I should show a picture of just the respirator, or a picture that is zoomed out so you cannot see my face. I can’t stop thinking about it. And since I have very little filter (hopefully my respirator has a better one), here I am writing again. Guess what? I write about this stuff because it is uncomfortable. It should make you uncomfortable. Do you know what else is uncomfortable? Whole units of people with the same diagnosis. Hell, whole hospitals with the same diagnosis, in some cases. This is not normal.”

— “Everybody Just Breathe” by Amanda V. Peterson

Of course, this virus wasn’t just about the illness. In the United States, it got political. In the early days, which is the focus of Peterson’s memoir, people were debating mask mandates and state lockdowns.

In western Wisconsin, where Peterson lives, there was less support for such lockdowns or mandates.

For this nurse, that was jarring.

“I’d watch people die at work, then cross the border home and see lines outside the bars, because Wisconsin was open and Minnesota was not,” she says.

She tried to share what she knew as a medical professional, posting about respirators and face masks … but it didn’t feel like enough.

“I wanted to run down the street, banging pots and pans, warning people that it didn’t matter if they were healthy,” she said.

She had a front seat in the hospital to know what this virus could do to people, even healthy people.

“The ability to breathe,” she says, “is so taken for granted.”

“My name is Amanda. I am a third-generation nurse … I knew early on I wanted to do something medical. At Girl Scouts one year, I made a first aid kit out of a film canister. (Yes, I am dating myself. Let us pretend my age makes me wiser, mmmkay?) On the playground at school, I wore the kit tied on a shoelace like a necklace. It had alcohol wipes, antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids for scraped knees. I loved being the one to fix people. I liked saving the day. It was the beginning.”

— “Everybody Just Breathe” by Amanda V. Peterson

Fast forward to 2022, and much of life feels “normal” again.

The Petersons have taken a family vacation. They also got COVID in January — and came out OK. At work, the COVID ICU is not currently needed.

Still …

“I feel like all of us are holding our breath for the fall and winter,” Peterson says.

When the pandemic started, Peterson was working toward a degree as an acute care nurse practitioner. Having graduated in May, she will soon move on from her job at the ICU — but she’ll still be there, still at the same hospital, but now as a pulmonary critical-care practitioner.

“I’m still helping people breathe,” she says.

“Everybody Just Breathe: A COVID Nurse Memoir of Stamina and Swear Words”

Author: Amanda V. Peterson

Publisher: Beaver’s Pond Press

Price: $16.95

How to get it: You can buy signed copies of the book on the author’s website at Thisnursemom.com.

Bonus: The book, which is starting to be shared by health care facilities and groups in Minnesota and is in its second printing, comes with discussion questions.

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