Abyss

"Stare into the abyss, and it stares back at you." I took this image during the pandemic, right after we had come through the second wave of COVID, which lasted several months. Nurse anesthetists like me were then redeployed as ICU nurses. After months of lockdown—spending all my time in the hospital—we were finally allowed to go out into the ocean. This is the image I took that day, and it felt truly special. I won’t go into much detail about what my peers and I went through, but the situation was so dire that they had to pile bodies in refrigerated trucks and convert the hospital’s main hall into a field hospital. As isolated as we are on this island, we soon ran out of ventilators for every patient. Choices had to be made. I’m grateful I never had to make those decisions. This image is special because at first glance, anyone would just see a lovely underwater scene—just as most people remained unaware of what was really happening inside hospitals. The abyss awaits behind the curtains.