Written by one of Alex Pretti’s coworkers at the VA hospital.
“For Alex Pretti — From a Physician, For a Nurse
Every physician knows this: we do not save lives alone. We do it arm in arm with nurses. With ICU nurses. With the ones who catch what we miss, who speak up, who stay late, who hold families together when the medicine runs out.
Alex Pretti was that nurse. He chose to serve his country throughout his life, working in the ICU at the VA, serving veterans, serving those who had already given everything. He stood at bedsides where courage is quiet and exhaustion is constant, where nurses don’t get headlines — they get blood on their shoes and families in their arms.
Ask any doctor who worked with him and they will tell you: he protected. He taught. He defended women colleagues. He bought coffee for broken interns. He made the ICU more human. That is what great nurses do. They don’t just carry out orders. They carry the unit.
And then, one last time, he served as a nurse outside the hospital. With a camera in his hand. With his conscience in front of him. He stepped toward someone being harmed — not as a threat, not as a protester looking for chaos, but as a healer responding to suffering: the same reflex that defines this profession. His gun was legally holstered. His hands were occupied filming. His instinct was the same one every ICU nurse knows: see harm, step in, protect.
As physicians, we talk about teams, about trust, about partnership. Alex was the kind of nurse every doctor hopes to have when things go bad: the one who has your back, the one who has the patient’s back, the one who never looks away.
We didn’t just lose a man. We lost a nurse. A protector. A healer. And the hardest truth of all: he spent his life running toward danger for others — and in the end, that is what killed him.
Rest in power, Alex Pretti. Medicine and humanity will feel your absence.”
Fearsome Beard 