Thread by @LilRedRooster

There is no talk of how gruesome, macabre, and unnatural it is to have someone be aggressively treated for ARDS: Proned, paralyzed, sedated, skin blistered or bruising from pressure points that come with proning. Bleeding and oozing from their mouth, nose, and eyes.

Most of the people that we're talking about getting ventilators will die this way.

Proned, paralyzed, alone, never getting to say another word before they die, or as they're dying.

Their family will only get updates from afar, they won't get to be with them while they're sick.

For many, their family will never get to see them, even when their heart finally gives out on the ventilator.

Their body will be taken away. No one to hold their hand, give them one last kiss on their forehead. No one to say goodbye, to tell them everything is okay.

No one to witness their last moments on earth except the nurses, dressed in masks and gowns and gloves and face shields. Just cold, stark rooms with bright, unnatural lights, surrounded by sadness and quiet, clicking machinery.

That is the reality that you're asking for when you say "Get more ventilators, we just need more ventilators".

It's a grotesque, inhuman death that most of these people will experience. That will be the legacy we in healthcare will leave for them.

It is that inhuman experience that will be what many healthcare providers will carry with us, long past the end of this pandemic. Long past when this passes for everyone else, when the fear of infection finally subsides in the outside world.

We will still carry them all.