COVID-19 was far from the world’s first go-around with a pandemic. In 2009, H1N1 claimed hundreds of thousands of lives worldwide. For nurses at the MICU who had cared for patients back then, COVID-19 at times was a haunting replay of the painfully familiar fight to treat patients struggling to breathe. As the first COVID patients came in, MICU staff faced ever-changing protocols and the unnerving realization that this virus was even more dangerous than anything they had faced before.