Ottawa Nurse Serenades Patients In ICU

A nurse at The Ottawa Hospital is going viral. Amy Lynn Howson works in the ICU and in a video that's been shared on the hospital's Twitter page, she's seen serenading her patients by singing and playing the guitar. The song is called 'You Are Not Alone.' She says she wrote it a few years ago when a friend of hers was going through mental health struggles.

This is Amy-Lynn. An endoscopy nurse at The Ottawa Hospital, who has recently been redeployed to the ICU.
Here she is with a beautiful song for our patients... “You are not alone”.

Thank you for lifting our spirits, Amy-Lynn! 💙#StrongerTogether pic.twitter.com/Xn11mNr44D

— The Ottawa Hospital (@OttawaHospital) April 24, 2021

"Sometimes people don't have the answers to tell you how to fix things or how to get better," said Howson. "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."

"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," Howson 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."

She has been a nurse for 9 years and was recently moved to the ICU from another department to deal with the influx of COVID patients.