On my third day I got the reminder. My first two days here, things seemed normal-ish. Yes, there were way more ICU patients than usual, and most of them had #COVID19. We still have to wear lots of PPE, and patients stay sick in the hospital a long time.
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But we met in a workroom, not in a temporary ICU. We had some new patients who did not have COVID (at least not that we knew of). And there was a system in place for managing the additional strain on the hospital system.
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When I came in yesterday morning (day 3), 1 patient who had been stably critically ill had taken a sudden turn for the worse. And despite everything we could do, his life was ending. This is the COVID I remember from New York.
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We called the patient’s family to allow, as per policy, one family member to come visit. And then we went about doing our best to make sure he would still be alive by the time they made it (he was, barely).
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Someone who hadn’t seen their relative in over a month was able to say goodbye, in person, to a transformed version of his body they could never have imagined.
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This body has tubes in his nose and mouth, IVs in his neck and arms. The tubes stretch out from him, like the arms of an octopus, toward various machines. This body is too weak to move. He has bruises and scars from the various procedures done as we tried to care for him.
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And we have taken away his voice. First, by putting in a breathing tube, which literally goes right through the vocal cords. But we also give him medication to make him comfortable, so he is no longer alert. In his dying moments, he has no voice. 💔
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I have often been struck by this—when we put a breathing tube in, we can never be sure (COVID or not) that it will come out. We, not his loved ones, may have just heard the patient’s last words. 😞
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The one in-person visit at the end of life is woefully insufficient, I know. It doesn’t make up for all the missing time of that hospitalization. As their loved one was suffering, sick, & dying, no family member was allowed to be there, be a witness, understand what happened.
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But it’s leaps and bounds better than saying goodbye through a screen, so I guess we should be grateful for it. Even if we don’t feel like we have much right now, we need to hold on to every little bit of gratitude.
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We need that light to guide us through the rest of the darkness ahead. Months into this pandemic, there is no real end in sight.
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