The text message sent an ice-cold chill down my spine. Here it was, the time had finally come. I had known it would, it was expected, but I was still unprepared. We had been lucky so far, but our luck had suddenly changed. I realized I had stopped getting ready for work when I received the message and was just sitting there staring at my phone. I mentally shook myself and reached down to put my shoes on. A quick glance in the mirror and I saw that I had paled slightly. “Snap out of it girl, I can do this!” I whispered softly to my reflection as I turned the lights out, locked my doors and climbed into my car. I couldn't believe this was happening so soon after the devastating Almeda fires that had swept through our valley just weeks before. Several of our staff members had lost everything and many of us had been evacuated for weeks. We had not even begun to recover yet and now the dreaded Covid had made its way into our building. As I pulled into the parking lot of my facility, I took a deep breath, gathering my courage. For the past several months nurses had been called heroes-front line heroes. I am not a hero by any means, I was scared. Scared for my residents, scared for my co-workers, and scared for myself and my family. But there I was, entering work through a side door, the door that would be used for our Covid hall. I knew I would not see the rest of the building until Covid left us. I walked in, unsure of what to expect. I knew the plan that had been decided upon for when it finally came into our building but speaking about it and living it were two entirely different things. The hallway was eerily empty, call lights were flashing, and I heard coughing coming from one of the rooms. There were plastic drawers in front of each room filled with plastic disposable gowns and gloves. I walked into the room that had been turned into an emergency nurses' station and saw the nurse I was relieving. She too looked bewildered, and exhausted. In that one day seven residents tested positive for Covid. Our first seven. She briefly gave me the details on how things were working, which doors I could not breach, and how each of the seven were. Some were running a fever, and some were showing no symptoms and couldn't believe they had it. She wished me good luck as she fled the building to hurriedly get home to her shower. As the door shut after her I had a brief moment of panic. The what-if's flittering through my mind had me momentarily rooted to that spot. Again, I mentally shook myself, I couldn't just stand there, my patients needed me. With that thought I sprung into action, going from room to room taking vital signs, bringing medications. After awhile the noisy plastic gowns and N-95 mask became normal, habit almost. Compassion overtook me as I walked into each room, amid all the suffering patients, fear for myself faded into the background. That night was extremely difficult, but it was only the first night of many. More residents continued to get sick, nurses and techs as well. We became short-staffed, we that had not gotten it were working 16-hour days with double and triple the normal patient load. More halls were being turned into Covid halls. It was everything we could do to keep our resident's comfortable. Family members were visiting through the outside windows, not knowing if that would be the last time they saw their loved one alive. Death visited us many times throughout the next several weeks. We tried to ensure that no one had to die alone. I can still see my gloved hand holding the wrinkled, feeble hand of a patient struggling to take his final breath, telling him through my own tears that his family loved him. He fought hard, but in the end the virus won as it did so often. I felt so helpless as I watched his eyes glaze over and with tears streaming down my face, I pronounced him dead. My heart still aches thinking of all the people that have died without being surrounded by their loved ones. Like all things in life, that time finally passed. All our remaining residents began to get better and we had no more new cases within our walls. I was one of the few that never tested positive, which I will never understand. I was no more careful than my co-workers, I did nothing different from any of them. I worked alongside of them, we laughed together and cried together, doing whatever we could to make that time bearable. But one by one, they tested positive. There was only a small handful of us that never got Covid. Facilities across the nation continue to test staff once or twice a week. The fear of a second wave of the virus plagues us all as the fight against Covid is far from over. Unfortunately, this is our world's new normal.