Participant ID: P16
Pseudonym: Elena
Age: 47
Gender: Woman
Occupation: ICU nurse (currently on stress leave)
Living situation: Lives with husband and 16-year-old son in a single-family home in Coquitlam
Relevant context: 22 years as a nurse; worked the entire pandemic in COVID-19 ICU; on stress leave since August
Interview date: 2025-12-05
Interview length: 35 minutes
Interviewer: R2
Location: Elena's home

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I: Thanks for meeting with me, Elena. Tell me about yourself.

P: Sure. I'm 47, I'm a nurse, I've been a nurse for 22 years. I work in ICU at one of the big hospitals downtown. Or — I worked, I should say. I've been on stress leave since August. I'm married, my husband's a teacher, we have a 16-year-old son. We've been in this house twelve years.

I: When you hear loneliness, what comes to mind?

P: My coworkers. The ones who got me through the pandemic and who I cannot talk to anymore because I am too — I am too broken to face them. So my loneliness is the absence of the only people who would actually understand me, and I am the one keeping them away. It is — yeah. It's complicated.

I: Can you tell me more about that?

P: Yeah. So during the pandemic, in the ICU, we — we did things and saw things that you cannot describe to people who weren't there. My husband, who I love, who is a good man, he cannot understand. He was teaching kindergarten on Zoom. I was holding people's iPads up to their dying faces so their families could say goodbye over FaceTime. There is no bridge between those two experiences. So my marriage, in some ways, has been lonely since 2021. Not because Phil is bad — Phil is wonderful — but because he was not there and he cannot be there now.

I: And your coworkers?

P: My coworkers are the only people who know. But I — when I went on leave, I withdrew. I stopped answering their messages. I think I was ashamed. I was the strong one. I was the senior nurse, the one who took the new grads under her wing. And I broke. And I couldn't face the people who saw me as the one who didn't break. Some of them have reached out. I haven't responded. Which I know is wrong. I'm working on it.

I: How does it feel in your body?

P: My body is, like, in revolt. I have insomnia, I have nightmares, I have — I get these flashbacks. I had a panic attack at Safeway in July when someone coughed near me. That was the moment I knew I had to take leave. My GP confirmed PTSD. So my body has, in a sense, made the decision for me. I cannot work. The body said no.

I: Is the loneliness different from being alone?

P: It's both. I am physically alone in this house most days because Phil and Adrian are at work and school. And I cannot fill the time. I used to be a person who worked 60 hours a week and ran a household. Now I can barely make breakfast. So I am alone in a literal sense, and I am alone in the sense that the people who would get it are people I'm avoiding.

I: Tell me about a recent moment of loneliness.

P: Last week. I went to a funeral for a former colleague. She died — she died last month. Suicide. She was 38. She worked alongside me through the worst of it. And the funeral was — it was full of nurses I haven't seen since I went on leave. And they came up to me with so much tenderness. Like, asking how I was, hugging me. And I was — I should have been comforted. Instead I felt like a fraud and a coward, because I haven't been there for them, and Tara died and I wasn't checking on her. So the funeral was a very lonely event for me, surrounded by the people who would have helped me if I had let them.

I: Have you found things that help?

P: My EAP set me up with a trauma therapist who specialises in healthcare workers. She has been very, very good. I see her weekly. She is — without her I do not know if I would have made it through the fall.

I: Anything else?

P: I — I started painting. It's bad painting, but I do it. Acrylics. Bowls of fruit, that kind of thing. The repetitive thing of mixing the colours, putting them on canvas, is the only time my mind quiets down. So I have a small studio set up in the basement. Phil set it up for me.

I: What didn't work?

P: I tried sleeping pills. They didn't help, they just gave me weird dreams. I tried not telling anyone the diagnosis and trying to push through. Catastrophe. I tried going back to work in October and lasted four hours. So a lot of things have not worked.

I: What does your loneliness tell you?

P: That I have been carrying something that nobody around me can hold for me, and that I need to find the people who can. The therapist is one. My colleagues, if I let them back in, would be another. But I have been so used to being the giver of help that being the receiver of it feels foreign. The loneliness is telling me to learn that.

I: Do you think of yourself as a lonely person?

P: I am a person in a specific lonely period. I was not lonely before the pandemic. I had a rich social life, work was a community, my home was full. The pandemic isolated me in slow motion. And now I am at the bottom of that isolation. I think I can climb back. I have to believe I can.

I: Anything that helped that surprised you?

P: My son. He is 16, he is a teenage boy, he is supposed to be embarrassed by his mother. But he has been — quietly — he has been so kind. He comes home from school and sits with me in the kitchen for half an hour before going to his room. He doesn't try to fix anything. He just is in the room. I think he has been my best therapist, in some ways. Without him saying a word.

I: If you could change one thing about how society handles loneliness?

P: Healthcare workers. We are — the rates of moral injury, PTSD, suicide in healthcare are catastrophic. Nobody is doing enough. The loneliness of being the people who carried the pandemic while everyone else got on with their lives — there is no acknowledgement of that, and there should be. We are not okay. Most of us are not okay. And we cannot just keep going.

I: Anything I haven't asked?

P: Just that — I am one of the lucky ones. I have a husband, I have a son, I have a house, I have benefits that paid for the therapist. Many of my colleagues do not have those things. Whatever I am dealing with, multiply it by ten for them. Please remember that.
