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She Helped New York Through the Worst of the Pandemic. Then the Nightmare Followed Her Home
When I flew to New York City at the height of the pandemic in April 2020, it was my first time practicing medicine outside of my home state of Arkansas. Before I left to battle a strange disease in the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, I said goodbye to my husband and four young children, making sure to leave them the passwords to our family’s financial accounts in case I didn’t come back. As a pulmonologist, I suddenly had one of the nation’s most important occupations. And I couldn’t sit around, watching COVID-19 kill more and more people, while my fellow medical workers begged for help.
During the 10 days I spent volunteering at Wyckoff, patients were packed so tightly in the emergency room that it was hard to pass between gurneys. There weren’t enough sedatives to go around, so patients would sometimes wake up prematurely and pull the breathing tubes out of their throats. The scene was beyond my worst expectation.
I never thought that nightmare would follow me home. But today, our intensive care unit in northern Arkansas is flooded with mostly unvaccinated and young patients on ventilators. Several nurses have quit or retired early, leaving an overwhelmed staff to deal with the constant barrage of patients. Stretchers line the hallways. We had to create a mini ICU in another wing of the hospital to deal with the influx. In the chaos, sometimes we don’t know which patient is in which room. Sometimes we send patients home and they come back sicker the next day. More than a year later, people dying of COVID-19 are back to saying goodbye to their loved ones through iPads, while isolated in dark rooms.
It’s frustrating and exhausting, because this time, it’s preventable. It’s free and quick to get vaccinated. I’d like to say that I don’t harbor resentment toward those still unwilling to get the shots, but I do. I really wish they would reconsider. I wish they would think about all of the people around them and not just themselves. Now we’re back to asking, how long is this going to last? Is there just going to be another one with a different strain? Is this the new normal?
https://time.com/6086867/covid-19-rebecca-martin/
During the 10 days I spent volunteering at Wyckoff, patients were packed so tightly in the emergency room that it was hard to pass between gurneys. There weren’t enough sedatives to go around, so patients would sometimes wake up prematurely and pull the breathing tubes out of their throats. The scene was beyond my worst expectation.
I never thought that nightmare would follow me home. But today, our intensive care unit in northern Arkansas is flooded with mostly unvaccinated and young patients on ventilators. Several nurses have quit or retired early, leaving an overwhelmed staff to deal with the constant barrage of patients. Stretchers line the hallways. We had to create a mini ICU in another wing of the hospital to deal with the influx. In the chaos, sometimes we don’t know which patient is in which room. Sometimes we send patients home and they come back sicker the next day. More than a year later, people dying of COVID-19 are back to saying goodbye to their loved ones through iPads, while isolated in dark rooms.
It’s frustrating and exhausting, because this time, it’s preventable. It’s free and quick to get vaccinated. I’d like to say that I don’t harbor resentment toward those still unwilling to get the shots, but I do. I really wish they would reconsider. I wish they would think about all of the people around them and not just themselves. Now we’re back to asking, how long is this going to last? Is there just going to be another one with a different strain? Is this the new normal?
A relative of mine moved to this town some years ago because of low taxes and the fact that just about everybody is white. But it appears that just about everybody is also stupid. My relative and his wife are among the relatively few vaccinated people, but the wife is in her 70s and has a lot of health problems; if she gets a breakthrough infection - more probable there than elsewhere because the place is a fucking petri dish - she could be in deep trouble. If you lie down with Trumpist dogs, you might wake up a pretty bad flea infestation.
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