COVID Milestone

My Facebook memories this month keep popping up with posts from 2 years ago. It was a very weird time. I remember feeling scared and worried. I was worried about my parents and my own family, as I’m sure everyone else was too. In the midst of that fear, many of us drew on humor from silly memes to get us though another day.

Many people were home as offices shut down, with quite a few businesses still working out their work from home plans with their employees, so any posts about Covid tended to get quite a few comments. None of us knew what to expect from even the next few months, let alone the next few years but what I thought of today is that there are ONE MILLION PEOPLE, many who probably partook of those FB posts with their own friends and family who are no longer with us.

I can’t help wondering how they felt when they got sick–how scared they must have been. In my own experience treating COVID patients I never actually had anyone ask me if they were going to die or, later when vaccines came out, show regret for not getting vaccinated. I also never talked about vaccination with patients I treated. By the time they saw me, they were usually on significant amounts of oxygen and discussing vaccines would have been pointless and, honestly, cruel.

There’s a weird sense you get though, when treating these patients, where you start just knowing which ones will succumb even while they’re still very much alert and talking, albeit, in short sentences as their respiratory rates are usually pretty high. And you’re looking at them and in your head, you’re thinking they’re going to die but you can’t show that on your face so you keep talking about the weather or baseball, as you’re also explaining how this BiPap will hopefully help ease their breathing. I saw too many men around my age or my brothers’ ages, and often I’d see them in the ER first, or maybe when they transferred up to the unit I would have that day. All I could think was they are middle aged. They should be able to beat this, but I don’t think they will–but that didn’t stop me from trying my best. It didn’t stop any of us from trying our hardest.

Some patients would be there for weeks, a few, even months, before COVID finally claimed them. This scenario was repeated at every single hospital in the country to some degree. I wonder how many other healthcare workers would get that feeling when they would be talking to and treating their COVID patients? I’m curious. I’ve worked in my field for decades and can’t recall any other time it happened to me, or at least not the same weird feeling I’d get as I’d adjust their high flow oxygen yet again to try to get a decent O2 sat on them. I’ve seen plenty of COPDers not make it and cancer patients, but most of them were on a long path to the end. For COPD patients, it was often years that we’d see them and it would become much more frequent at the end. While still very sad, it was different. It’s hard to explain. All deaths are sad and tragic, but it happens to all of us eventually. I think with COVID it’s just that so many went from healthy to very sick so suddenly. Thankfully, not everyone died and there were some happy recoveries. I just hope we’re through the worst of it.

Photo is of me going in to do an EKG on my very first COVID patient. A coworker snapped my picture. That was the only time I ever wore a PAPR. (I look like Austin Powers! lol) After this, it was an N95. The first 3 months or so we had a handful of N95s issued to us. I kept mine in a Gladware-type covered bowl and wore a drawstring bag with my bowl and my face shield in it. Even though we now have plenty of N95s, I still grab an extra here and there to have just in case…