Melanie Arciaga worked her last shift as a registered nurse at Harborview Medical Center, in Seattle, on April 3, 2020. Back then, her hospital’s PPE was often locked up; nurses had to request it each time they needed it. New patients were tested for COVID-19 as they were admitted, but if they tested negative, no extra precautions were then taken. At the end of that last shift, Arciaga had to take the vital signs of a patient whose roommate had just developed respiratory symptoms. The only protection she had was a pair of gloves; she wasn’t wearing a mask or eye protection. The patient coughed, “and I felt it [go] straight into my face and my eyes,” she told me. She was too busy to give it much thought until she overheard another nurse say that the roommate had tested positive for COVID-19. There wasn’t much Arciaga could do, so she finished her charts, went home, and went to sleep. She woke up to a voicemail saying that the patient who’d coughed on her had tested positive. Less than 48 hours later, she was in pain “from head to toe,” she said. “It felt like nails driving through my fingers, my toes, my foot, my head.” One night, her husband later told her, she woke up and said to him, “Just kill me right now. I can’t have this pain anymore.” When her husband drove her to the emergency room, he refused to leave the parking lot—he thought she was going to die in the hospital. She had a fever for nine days and the pain lasted for two weeks. Nearly a year later, Arciaga still has an acute burning sensation in her nose. Her lungs didn’t heal until January; she had to pause every so often to cough while we spoke over the phone in early March, and she still gets short of breath. “I think this is going to be my new norm,” she said.