Nurse's social media post makes her a face, voice for healthcare workers in COVID-19 fight
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (IOWA'S NEWS NOW) — "I'm not really used to be the center of attention. I don't like it. It's not really my thing."
Tough luck for Syndi Lane. She's something of a social media star now - thanks to a post about working in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic as a trauma nurse at Mercy Cedar Rapids. She shared those perspectives in an exclusive interview with Iowa's News Now on April 1.
It was born from a sleepless night after work on March 26.
"I got off. It was about an hour after I was supposed to," she recalls after a 13-hour shift that Thursday. She finally took off the protective mask she'd been wearing that night - the same one she'd had been wearing for the better part of three weeks. Her face was sore - and red markings covered her cheeks and the bridge of her nose where the mask had been pushing into her skin.
"I always call my husband on the way home, so I called him," Sydni says, "And was just talking to him - he's asking me how my day was - I immediately just started bawling."
It was the type of fatigue that still kept her up once she got home.
"I was just mentally and physically and emotionally exhausted," she says. "The only thing I wanted to do was just sleep and I couldn't - so I was laying there tossing and turning."
That's when Sydni went to her phone and started writing on her social media, the outlet she calls her "diary."
Along with a picture of herself standing in her scrubs and her redden face standing in the hospital's locker room, she wrote a long caption that included the confession that "after 4 years of being an ER nurse, I suddenly feel like I know nothing." Sydni sent the post out on Facebook and Instagram before finally falling asleep. She woke up to the revelation that the post was being shared across the country and the world.
"My message was getting out there, I guess," Sydni says.
"Out there" is a bit of an undersell. The Facebook version of the post has been shared more than 24,000 times as of April 5. The Instagram post has close to 1.2 million likes - and her account has gone from about 2,000 followers to more than 56,000.
She might not like the spotlight - but Sydni is gaining perspective about the power of her message.
"'You're making a difference - whether it's one person who read the post and said, 'Oh my goodness - this is real' or whether it was thousands of people,'" she says her husband told her. "'You're making a difference and this is a big deal. You should be very proud of yourself for just being so vulnerable and being so open.'"
That vulnerability is helping people see the seriousness of the pandemic - which is what Sydni has been trying to tell people all along.
"I'm receiving messages from people who are saying, 'Wow, I never realized how real this was until I read your post. I'm going to stay home now for you. Because I saw your post, I'm going to stay home,'" she says. "That means the world because that's all I've ever wanted people to do is just listen to what we're saying."
"We're not crazy. I promise."
