“Less Praise and More PPEs please!”

KP Mendoza was running in Central Park last week when he was flooded by exhaustion, anxiety, guilt, and frustration.

As the relentless pressure of being a nurse battling the pandemic in New York bore down on him, Mendoza began thinking about what could happen if he contracted the coronavirus. 

So, at 24, he decided to draft a will.

Mendoza is young and healthy. But treating COVID-19patients, wearing the same N95 mask for hours and even days at a time, forced him to think seriously about dying. It’s all the worse that the US, he said, was woefully unprepared for a pandemic and millions of people have since moved on to dismissing it as a hoax. 

Mendoza expressed this maelstrom of emotions on Facebook. His gut-wrenching words have since been shared over 132,000 times, with people thanking him, offering prayers, and lifting him up.

Overwhelmed by the attention and praise, Mendoza, a surgical and transplant ICU nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital, said that he stands by the first sentence of his post: “I am no hero. I am not ready to die.”

Having graduated from New York University in 2018, Mendoza, who considers himself a “baby nurse,” told Business Insider that he is not looking to be a “savior” or a “martyr.”

“This is my first job, and I didn’t sign up to die because I wasn’t protected enough,” he said. “I’m not here to just mitigate my own death. I’m here to do good work and to go home and come back the next day to continue doing good work.”

Article Originally from Business Insider