Code Catastrophe: Inside the ICU

The Hingham 'Cast

Hingham native Kim Boggini is an ICU nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. She was in the first wave of employees to be vaccinated. Her first dose was about a week before Christmas and she got her booster or second dose January 8th. Other than a sore arm, she didn’t have any side effects from the first shot, but after the second shot, she felt lousy for a day. “I felt like I couldn’t get out of bed,” she said. “My head feels full. I kind of feel like you feel when you’re starting to get sick and you’re kind of like, ‘I don’t feel that good.’ I don’t have a fever. I don’t have body aches. I don’t have chills. I don’t have a sore throat,” she said. “I’d so much rather feel this way than get Covid.”

Kim let us trail her through her through the vaccination process and sat down to talk with us about what it’s like to work in a Covid-specialty unit as cases surge. We talked with her a few times in the last month, so this is a compilation of those conversations. All while the news evolves daily. The first case of the highly contagious Covid variant has been confirmed in Massachusetts–which ups the pressure to get as many people vaccinated as possible before hospitals and healthcare workers–get overwhelmed.