Just like most hospitals, my hospital has also been asking us to reuse masks. They request us to drop it in a bin so they can send it through decon process and then we get the masks back. They want us to reuse them up to 7 times.

I have (self diagnosed) allergic and vasomotor rhinitis. I've tried on two of these decon'ed masks over the last week and each time I had to lift my mask (often multiple times while with a patient) to blow my mask. My first day I thought it was b/c I'd forgotten to take my antihistamine, but then the same thing happened yesterday (despite taking my antihistamine), I had to discard my mask in 1h of putting it on.

I guess I want to reach out our meddit folks and see how I should (or if I should) address this with leadership within my department without seeming like a pansy who is just avoiding to reuse masks (which I'm also against but willing to do just b/c everyone else is doing so as well).