'You are not alone': A compassionate nurse comforts an ICU patient with an original song

These are dark times. Although more and more citizens across the world are getting their first and second vaccinations against the deadly Coronavirus, patients infected with it are still struggling in the ICU. Therefore, a nurse working in the ICU at the Ottawa Hospital in Canada decided her patients could use a little reassurance that they were not fighting this pandemic alone. While nurses and other frontline health workers have borne the brunt of the pandemic, working long hours in difficult conditions, endoscopy nurse Amy-Lynn Howson has shown us all that frontline health workers have some fight left in them yet, CTV News reports. For that, we should be more than grateful.

In a video that has gone viral since it was first posted to Twitter by Ottawa Hospital, the nurse can be seen standing outside an ICU patient's room, serenading them while strumming along on an acoustic guitar. Howson was singing an original song titled 'You Are Not Alone.' "I wrote it about three or four years ago when a friend was struggling with some mental health issues and it reminded me of some of my own struggles," she explained in an interview with CTV News. "Sometimes people don't have the answers to tell you how to fix things or how to get better."

Howson stated that the song was a reminder of how we were all weathering this storm together. She shared, "But for me in my own life journey, when someone's been there with me and just sat with me in it that can sometimes change a life. So that was the song and it hadn't really seen much of the life of the day until the pandemic and I realized it was maybe time to sing it." Hawson, who has been a nurse for the past nine years, was only recently redeployed to the ICU at the Ottawa Hospital. This is because the hospital is presently adjusting staffing, ramping down its non-urgent procedures to handle an influx of patients as Canada handles its third wave of the global pandemic.

Howson simply wishes to bring some hope, love, and light back into the ICU. Even beyond her ward, she has had a positive impact on thousands of Twitter users. About 4,000 people have "liked" the hospital's tweet online, whereas over 1,000 folks have retweeted the moving video of the nurse. "I've had the opportunity to go and do some medical missions abroad, and on one trip someone brought a guitar with them and that gave me the idea, why can't we start doing that here at home," she said. "I hadn't done that here at the Ottawa Hospital yet, but when I've been helping out in the ICU I noticed how heavy things have been and I saw how lonely the patients were. I thought if I don't do this now, when is there a better time to start bringing comfort to the patients just the way I can."