My origin story of how I went from a “trust the science” RN to telling people to use alternative & natural medicine whenever possible. Before March 2020, I had never once seen a patient get intubated just because their oxygen number looked bad. We treated the person in front of us - if they were walking, talking, and not in distress, we didn’t sedate them and shove a tube down their throat to breathe for them. Numbers were one piece of the picture, not the whole thing. Then COVID hit and everything flipped overnight. Suddenly we were intubating people who walked into the ER on their own, could hold a conversation, and weren’t gasping for air. The doctors said their low sats meant they were about to crash. It went against everything I’d been taught- treat the patient, not the numbers. Visitors weren’t allowed, so we let them FaceTime their families right before we did it. I looked them in the eyes and told them it was temporary- we’d wake them in a few days and they’d be home in no time. Right after the tube went in, we started Remdesivir. For the first couple days it felt like we were doing something heroic. Then the patients started dying. Multi-organ failure. The same people I’d joked with and reassured hours or days earlier were gone. I kept thinking, “How is this virus killing relatively young, healthy people this fast even with the best treatment we have?” By day six I noticed something that made my stomach drop: the COVID patients who refused intubation, including elderly ones with a list of comorbidities, were doing fine. Not one of them died. I started pointing it out to every doctor and nurse I worked with. They looked at me like I was crazy. By day nine the picture got worse. Patients who refused the tube but still got Remdesivir were dying at roughly 50%. The explanation I kept hearing was “only the sickest get the drug.” But that didn’t match what I was watching, what I was trained to see. By day ten I was not so quietly telling every person I knew: if you end up in the hospital with COVID, do not consent to intubation or Remdesivir. Do not allow them to do that to your loved ones. My ER kept doing both anyway. Even after the pattern was obvious to anyone who was actually in the rooms. Later I found out hospitals were getting paid extra for COVID patients who were intubated, more if they got Remdesivir, and still more for every day spent in an ICU bed. Once you see the incentives, the refusal to change course stops looking like pure science. I still can’t fully wrap my head around how fast the rules changed and how hard it was to get anyone to look at the actual results in front of us. I went from “trust the experts” to “watch what happens to the patients and decide for yourself.” If you were on the front lines and saw something different, say so. If you weren’t, this is why a lot of us stopped automatically trusting the system and have dropped out of it. I’m the villain and the hero of my own story and it’s hard to reconcile with either.