So things were pretty bad a few weeks back when I posted a dairy. We had a brief blip of hope, a dip in the inpatient numbers. But now it’s worse than ever. Our little hospital is once again boarding patients in the ER awaiting an inpatient bed. Every staffed floor and ICU bed is occupied, many with COVID patients. Worse yet, our ICU is partly crippled because several young ICU nurses have resigned after 18 months of grueling pandemic work with no end in sight, so we don’t have enough people to keep every bed open. Everyone is frazzled and burned out. They’re all so tired. Work a 12 hour shift, stay an extra 6 hours to fill gaps, go home, gobble some junk food, sleep for 4 hours, come back and do it again. Over and over.
This morning on rounds I was documenting on a computer in a small unit off the main medical floor when the nursing supervisor apologized as she wheeled in a body for temporary storage. The morgue downstairs was full, and they needed the bed just vacated for another patient.
I have a patient with cancer who desperately needs a procedure done in the referral center an hour away; but they can’t accept my patient because at the 800+ bed tertiary care center every single bed is occupied, with a hundred more boarding in the ER or in the hallways. Their ICU is packed full of COVID patients on ventilators. My patient may well die waiting for that bed, another indirect victim of COVID.
At our little hospital we’re doing our best to get COVID patients well enough to go home on oxygen to make room for the next wave; but sometimes they decompensate and come right back a few days later, and board in the ER to await a bed again. On the treadmill in purgatory.
Yesterday in the office I did manage to convince a few more reluctant patients to get vaccinated. But a larger number refused. Including the guy who said “I know I probably should, but my family is so against it, I can’t do it”. “So you’ll risk infection and death to avoid aggravating family members who are wrong? Who are buying fraudulent conspiracy theories? You might die because you don’t want to hurt their feelings?”
He had no answer for me.
I probably get two or three inquiries about Ivermectin every day. They’ve supplanted requests for Hydroxychloroquine. You can visualize my face-palm.