I’ve worked in emergency medicine for over 20 years. And what I’ve seen here and experienced here in Rhode Island over the last eight months is unlike anything else I’ve experienced in my career in this country. It is much closer in fact to that which I’ve experienced working in refugee camps and battlefields across the world.
Despite the vast healthcare resources in our state, this pandemic has pressed us to the brink. Our hospitals are rapidly filling up day after day as the numbers in Rhode Island climb even beyond those which we saw in the surge this spring. This is why we need to remain vigilant and do absolutely everything in our power to protect ourselves and others and to halt the spread of the virus.
“We are seeing the real patients who come to the hospital struggling to breathe, their lungs filling with fluid, their eyes filled with fear.”
My team and our teams in the emergency departments around the state are seeing the real patients with COVID-19. The ones who are lucky enough to have a mild illness, like the young retail worker and mother who I diagnosed with COVID-19 earlier this week, her life is still turned upside down. Despite this being a mild illness she is still filled with fear. She immediately began to worry when I gave her the diagnosis about how many of her co-workers, how many of her customers, how many of her family members, she may have inadvertently infected despite her best efforts to keep safe. And she’ll be out of work for weeks struggling with this virus.
We are seeing the real patients who come to the hospital struggling to breathe their lungs filling with fluid, their eyes filled with fear. We know that there is no cure. At this point, the best that we can do we know is just to support and try to mitigate the effects of this virus. I had this conversation with a fellow health care worker last month. He’s my age and he’d been healthy, but he, like so many others around the globe, got COVID. And he ended up in the ICU on a ventilator. He did survive. But he is now suffering the long term effects of post-COVID syndrome. He is debilitated by chronic pain, he struggles to breathe, he has a hard time getting out of bed most days. He’s one of the lucky ones, but he may never get back to normal.
Even if we’re young and healthy, none among us is actually invincible, because COVID-19 is so dangerous. When infected people are dying in the hospital, they often don’t have family members at their side. This protocol is necessary for the safety of others given the way that we know this virus behaves and is transmitted. This means that when dying patients are in the hospital, they usually they’re alone. And so I and my staff sit by them. We hold their hands. We hold up our phones to their faces so that their families can be there on FaceTime as they die, so they don’t have to die alone.
There are times when we are overwhelmed. We try to deny it. We try to hide it. We try to work past it. But at the end of every shift you can see it in the weariness and fears we take off our PPE, our faces bruised and scraped by the tight-fitting masks that we’ve learned to be grateful for. And then we head home to our families hoping against hope that this isn’t the day we bring COVID home to our children, our spouses and our loved ones. Despite all the precautions we take, we’re still afraid to hug our family members. Many of us are still sleeping in basements on couches and tense because we would rather do that than risk bringing this deadly virus home to our families.
If we, the people of Rhode Island, don’t quickly change our behavior, we will rapidly overwhelm our hospitals and we will need to open the field hospital within days or weeks. But all of us collectively in our state have the power to prevent this. All of us have the ability to stop this virus. I implore all of you to reevaluate your day-to-day actions and be vigilant in your safety measures. The miraculous power of modern medicine has not yet caught up to this virus. But we do know that the seemingly simple things — wearing masks, social distancing, staying quarantined when you’re sick, staying home, avoiding social gatherings and crowds — these make all the difference. The steps that Governor Raimondo and state leaders have taken to lower the social gathering limit to restrict late night activities to encourage mask wearing and hand washing. These are things that we all need to be doing at this point. Throughout the crisis, they have done an incredible job of looking at the data and making necessary changes to protocols for the sake of community safety. But government can only do so much. These interventions only work if each and every one of us takes them to heart and changes them changes our practice and day to day living.
That is what will determine whether you and your families meet me in the emergency department, or whether you meet me when this is all over at our kids soccer games or the PTA meeting. I hope it’s the latter. But it’s up to every single one of you.
— Lynn Arditi, health reporter at The Public’s Radio, can be reached at larditi@thepublicsradio.org
