Alberta caregivers wrestle with anxiety, grief on COVID’s front line

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After losing her job as a YMCA lifeguard in March 2020 after COVID-19 cases first crept into Alberta, Duneesha Goonetilleke applied for work at long-term care facilities.

Then only 17, Goonetilleke had earned her health-care aide certification while in high school. She saw the pandemic as an opportunity to use that training to help others in a time of need, spurning CERB payments to work it.

“It just didn’t sit right with me. I felt like I could be doing more with my life at that point,” Goonetilleke recalled.

“In the end, I ended up losing money doing this job, but it didn’t really bother me, because it was really what I wanted to do. I really wanted to put my skills to work in a crisis.”

That month, Goonetilleke began working as a casual at Bethany Riverview, a long-term care centre in Calgary’s southwest that specializes in caring for those with dementia or Alzheimer’s disease.

The facility saw a relatively mild first wave of infections, reporting only seven cases and no deaths.

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But that changed quickly in the fall, when the pandemic’s second wave saw cases surge at many Alberta care homes, including Bethany Riverview. According to Alberta Health, the site recorded 15 deaths, as well as 93 cases. Bethany declined to provide a breakdown of cases between staff and residents. Goonetilleke was among those who fell ill.

The symptoms emerged on the evening of New Year’s Eve, souring Goonetilleke’s optimism for 2021. With immunizations just beginning in long-term care, she had been hopeful she would win the race against the virus and get the vaccine before she was infected.

“I was thinking, I was so close to getting it. I think I was two weeks away from getting it,” she said. “I know the benefits of immunization wouldn’t have immediately given me immunity, but it was pretty disappointing to see that happen.”

Though Goonetilleke recovered from the virus, albeit with some lingering symptoms many weeks later, she was only able to return to work after months away.

One of her coworkers, however, never had the chance to go back.

Joe (Jing) Corral, a 61-year-old worker at Bethany Riverview, died from COVID-19 Dec. 28, becoming the first health-care worker in Alberta to succumb to the disease. To date, the virus has claimed six health-care workers in the province.

Friends and family remembered Corral as a fearless, heroic worker dedicated to caring for others.

When Goonetilleke first joined the staff at the care home, Corral took her under his wing as a mentor. After losing a peer, the mood among coworkers never returned to normal.

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“I remember being down there the day he died. Our supervisors came in and told us that he passed away. And it was just a huge shock for us, because we’d never heard of another health worker dying, especially in our building,” Goonetilleke said.

“He took care of me really well. Losing him and working through all that pressure in the pandemic was defeating for me.”

Dr. Bonnie Lashewicz, an associate professor at the University of Calgary’s department of community health sciences, is leading a project with long-term care sites in Alberta to understand the challenges faced by workers at these sites and their mental-health needs in order to better provide them with supports.

She said society doesn’t pay enough attention to the “care economy” — the largely female workforce that holds together not just the continuing-care sector but also areas like disability services and child care.

The full mental-health impact of the pandemic on these workers won’t be clear for a long time to come, Lashewicz said.

“We’re going to find out in years and even decades to come what kind of a toll this has taken,” Lashewicz said. “We know that people who see themselves as caregivers are usually the last people who seek help for themselves.”

Public-health advocacy group Friends of Medicare said it has heard from numerous front-line workers in continuing care who are fearful and anxious about going to work, and grief-stricken by deaths of those they’ve cared for.

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Staffing issues — both before the pandemic but also due to outbreaks — made the experience even harder for many, said Sandra Azocar, the group’s executive director.

“I think it has been an incredibly tough time for all these people,” Azocar said. “This is skilled work, to care for other humans. These workers need to be provided training, supports and resources for them to do their jobs, and the compensation that comes with skilled labour.”

For Goonetilleke, the stress of working through a severe COVID-19 outbreak was compounded by an array of anxieties.

When she got sick, she worried she would pass COVID-19 along to her family, who ultimately didn’t contract the virus. She was also unable to exercise because of her illness, robbing her of an outlet to blow off steam.

Goonetilleke fell behind in her studies as a first-year kinesiology student at the U of C, making a difficult year of virtual lectures and isolation from her classmates even tougher. And when she did get the vaccine, she had an adverse reaction to the shot that set back her recovery further.

Between everything, Goonetilleke isn’t even yearning for a return to her pre-pandemic life — she’s longing to go back to the time before she got sick with the virus herself.

“I felt really isolated in my experiences just because I was a younger person. I didn’t really know any other people who had gone through what I had gone through,” she said. “I didn’t have peer support throughout the experience, and being isolated because of COVID was even harder.”

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But, with the spirit of a caregiver, Goonetilleke’s sympathies went out to facility’s residents, living through a pandemic on strict lockdown, with visitations from friends and family limited.

“In March, the first time that I entered this workforce and took care of them, I didn’t really realize the isolation that they go through, even without the pandemic,” she said.

“They did everything they could. They tried to connect the families virtually, but most of the time, they’d be in their rooms, isolated, because that was the procedure.”

Lashewicz’s study looks at “moral injury” among long-term care workers, which she described as the distress that arises from feeling as if there are things you should be doing but not being able to do them because of circumstances outside of your control.

Witnessing social isolation and enforcing difficult protocol around things like end-of-life visits can lead to moral injury, she said.

“These are people who are yearning for social interaction and engagement,” Lashewicz said. “All these protocols need to be followed even though something as profound as the death of someone is playing out right before their eyes.”

Concerns from workers around overworking and shaming have also emerged during the U of C study, Lashewicz noted.

jherring@postmedia.com

Twitter: @jasonfherring