async/await seems to be blocking requests in FastAPI

Question

I haave a challenge with async/await blocking other requests in FastAPI. My code used to work well calling requests in def functions. For instance:

someRequestsApis = APIRouter()

someRequestsApis.get("/something/")
def getThings():
   return list(things.find())

Things would work well in this format. Now, I find myself for some reason having to switch from pymongo to AsyncIOMotorClient. The thing is I cannot run the motor database apis in my requests without using async/await. What used to be:

def getThings():
   return list(things.find())

is now supposed to be:

async def getThings():
   return await things.find().to_list()

Even the background tasks that are supposed to handle some of this logic have to be asynchronous, yet requests get blocked. I have searched for answers on this issue, yet the answer seems to suggest that the solution has to be to remove async/await in my requests and since I seem not to have such a luxury what is my work around strategy for such?