Nurses are seen as guardian angels. By refusing vaccines, did we clip our wings?

This First Person column is the experience of Nathan Friedland, a nurse in Montreal's West Island. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

Twenty years ago, I went with two of my nursing student friends to a local clinic for our vaccinations against things like polio, mumps, tetanus and rubella.

This was not an option but a requirement — which seemed perfectly reasonable — in order to protect ourselves and our future patients in Montreal's hospitals. I ended up needing two intramuscular injections that day and just about fainted after they were given. But I never felt like my rights were being violated and was just looking forward to doing real work in a hospital.

The vaccines were just another hurdle to overcome, like the final exams would be, so that I could start my new and exciting career. My friends felt the same way. We never talked about refusing to get the mandatory vaccines. Never.

My nursing class consisted of an older population of students, and many of us were returning to school to pursue what we thought was our passion via an accelerated 22-month program at John Abbott College in Montreal's West Island.

My wife and two-month-old baby were there on that sunny evening on the college's front lawn in 2004, as we celebrated our graduation, full of optimism and hope. Everyone had at least one job offer, but very few would be getting full-time work. I worked at the McGill University Health Centre for two years on availability, until I finally got a full-time position.

Now, the province is practically begging nurses to work full time.

Maybe it's because we stopped being quiet about our working conditions. In 2018, a bold Sherbrooke nurse took to Facebook slamming then-health minister Gaétan Barrette in a tearful post about how little support she had to do her job. It went viral, and prompted many other nurses to speak out about forced overtime, unreasonable nurse-to-patient ratios and other issues in the once-coveted field of health care.

In response, Barrette vowed to improve those ratios — and was then ousted by a change in government. The new health minister also promised an end to forced overtime and to improve working conditions for nurses.

But then the pandemic took hold of the entire planet, and horror stories like Résidence Herron flooded news headlines daily. Thousands of seniors in long-term care homes died from a combination of a chronic lack of staff and a virulent virus. The army was sent in to help, emergency rooms and intensive-care units were overloaded with intubated patients — a health-care crisis the likes of which my generation of nurses had never seen before.

Without any vaccine available, nurses were seen as guardian angels, putting our lives on the line to save others. We were given free food, free parking and free coffee. We could advance to the front of the line at Costco. I remember one night, a fleet of police cars showed up outside the emergency room with their lights flashing. The officers got out of their cars and applauded us as heroes.

Miraculously, a vaccine was made available to us in January. I cried when I got my first dose as I thought of the corpses I had wheeled into a refrigerated truck behind my hospital during the first wave. Getting the vaccine felt like the beginning of the end of a horror story. For the first time in a long time, I had hope.

I expected 100 per cent of health-care workers to get vaccinated immediately, especially nurses. Heroes, after all, need weapons to fight a war. And, finally, we had one.

But months later, there are still thousands of nurses who have not been fully vaccinated.

Despite COVID having more waves than a Rocky movie has sequels, the head of Quebec's order of nurses saying we are responsible for protecting the public and that vaccination is a recognized means of doing so, unvaccinated nurses held their ground — forcing Health Minister Christian Dubé to delay his vaccine mandate by one month, fearing a severe rupture of services in the health-care network. 

Just before Dubé's first deadline of Oct. 15, almost 22,000 nurses were facing suspension because they weren't fully vaccinated. There were clear signs of a nursing shortage for years, but it took a pandemic to get the government to take it seriously.

Did we guardian angels clip our own wings? What has happened to a profession that has long been seen as respected and worthy of trust?

I still believe there is hope. It is possible that more nurses will work full time in the months to come, that forced overtime could be abolished and that nurse-to-patient ratios will become more reasonable.

A lot of that work falls to the government. But we nurses must do our part — and getting the vaccine by the Nov. 15 deadline would be a great way to show the public that we are the same professionals who saved so many lives in the last year and a half.

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