A day in a Louisiana hospital

JEFFERSON, Louisiana (AP) – Before the latest wave of coronavirus, Louisiana neurologist Robin Davis focused on her specialty: treating patients with epilepsy. These days, as patients infected with the virus flood her hospital in record numbers, she has taken on the added duties of a nurse, janitor and nurse.

“I bathed in bed on Sunday, emptied trash cans, changed sheets, took patients for MRI scans,” said Davis, who came on her days off to relieve overworked nurses at Ochsner Medical Center in the suburbs of New Orleans. by Jefferson.

The rapid rise in COVID-19 infections in the United States is once again overwhelming hospitals, especially in hot spots such as Louisiana, which reached a record number of coronavirus hospitalizations last week. Nearly 2,900 patients infected with the virus are currently hospitalized – and public health officials say the number of cases may not peak for several weeks. Louisiana has the fourth-lowest vaccination rate in the country, with just over 37% of residents fully vaccinated.

On a recent day in Ochsner, healthcare providers rushed through the hallways, putting on and taking off protective clothing whenever they entered a new area of ​​the building. In dozens of intensive care rooms, patients lay wan and motionless, tubes in their throats, as machines beeped to pump drugs through their system and ventilators forced air into their weakened lungs. Healthcare providers brought in from other hospitals quickly familiarized themselves with a new environment as they rushed to ease the load of overworked staff.

“We’re trying to provide the most consistent care possible, but to do that we need more hands,” said Davis. “One of the biggest problems for our nurses is that the volume of patients is such that we have to create beds that did not exist before. We need to find providers that were not set up before.

ACCIDENTAL ACCIDENTAL CHARGE

Ochsner Health is the largest health care provider in Louisiana, with 40 medical facilities across the state. More than 1,000 people – nearly 40% of coronavirus patients currently hospitalized in the state – are treated at Ochsner’s facilities. About 200 of them are on the main Jefferson campus, where three floors of the hospital’s west tower were built as care units for coronavirus patients.

Resources have been strained statewide, with hospitals starting to turn away people with other life-threatening emergencies such as heart attacks or strokes. Elective surgeries and other non-urgent care have been suspended.

Davis said there was no more need for his help than in Ochsner’s barely stretched nursing ward. She noted that her many recent tasks included finding drugs for nurses and moving patients in wheelchairs.

“If it relieved a nurse, if it gave her time to do what she needed to do, that’s what we did,” she said. “Sunday was supposed to be my day off with my kids, but we need help here, and someday I want to be able to tell these two little boys that I did the right thing by the time it was done. was necessary. “

NURSES HELPING NURSES

In the intensive care unit at Ochsner Medical Center, nurses Joan Blizzard and Arthur Bienvenu try to take care of each other with their coronavirus patients.

They tie their gowns to each other, prepare drugs and machines with barely a word, enter and exit patient rooms, their eyes being the only part of their face visible through their protective gear.

For the past year and a half, Bienvenu said, working 50 to 60 hours a week caring for patients and being surrounded by colleagues has helped him cope with the loss of his father to the virus last year.

He said he shared his father’s story with other grieving families, including how his father was on a ventilator for more than 20 days in the spring and how his family had to make the difficult decision to take him away.

“The result would not be what he wanted,” Bienvenu said. “He wouldn’t want to live with the trachea and PEG (feeding tube) and the gravity of the situation, so we decided to move on to the comfort of the incremental measures, and the little dignity and respect my father left behind.” , we have preserved this. “

Bienvenu said working with other grieving families has helped him make sense of the most tragic time of his life.

“People would ask me, ‘Why are you always coming?’ “, he said. “Because these people need us, you know?” We have to put an end to this. Everyone has a different path through this. I am blessed to be around the people I am around. It’s the only way I’m here.

ICU nurse Mary Lubrano watched her colleagues run down the hallway of the intensive care unit at Ochsner Medical Center as she lay on a hospital bed with the virus. She has been hospitalized for two weeks and is counting, her breathing is difficult because she suffers from a lack of oxygen.

“It was me,” she said of the other nurses, her voice choked with emotion. “And I wanted to be able to help them. “

Lubrano works in the intensive care unit at St. Bernard Parish Hospital, an Ochsner-run facility near her home in Chalmette, where she was first hospitalized before being transferred to the Jefferson campus.

She said she always checks her emails as often as possible to see how her fellow nurses at Chalmette are holding up.

“They’re breaking their butt over there, and they’re full of COVID patients, and they’re the same nurses on the schedule every day. They come and go, ”she said. “As a nurse it’s about giving back, so I can’t wait to go back. “

IT’S WORSE THIS TIME

The scale of this latest wave of coronavirus – largely spurred by the highly contagious delta variant – is deep, Blizzard said.

“People are getting sick so fast this time,” she said. “They will talk to you, and within hours we will have several people at the bedside” performing emergency procedures. “It’s so scary.”

If they survive, many will live with years of disability, she said.

Welcome wants people to understand the gravity of the current situation.

“It hits us all differently,” he said. “Yes, one person can cough or sneeze, but another person can be on a ventilator. “

WISHING TO BE VACCINATED

Jerome Batiste, a 26-year-old New Orleans resident, said he gets sick so rarely that he doesn’t think he needs the coronavirus vaccine. He assumed he had a strong immune system, having gone through the entire pandemic uninfected, he said.

As he sat by a window in a recovery room in one of Ochsner’s COVID units, soaking up the sun from the bench near his hospital bed, he said he wished he not only had received the vaccine, but wanted everyone he knows to get it, “and I’ll go if they need someone to go with them.”

Batiste is not sure where he contracted the virus, but said he took a family trip to Disney World and also visited friends in the weeks before he fell ill.

“It just happened,” he said. “It just came out of nowhere. I started to cough a lot.

He said he took over-the-counter cough medicine, hoping it would pass, but “it just got worse and worse, and I started throwing up a lot, and I couldn’t hold anything back.” .

Since being admitted to hospital last week, he has received vitamins, steroids, respiratory treatments and injections to prevent blood clots. He also developed a rare condition in which the muscle tissue in his body began to break down, requiring flushing of the kidneys to prevent other illnesses.

Batiste said he told his family and friends not to “get comfortable” with the virus and to protect himself with the vaccine.

“I just didn’t take this as seriously as most young people should,” he said, a port with tubes for his medication protruding from his right forearm. “You are never too safe to go for the vaccine. “

Mary Lubrano, the intensive care nurse now ill with COVID-19, said she had never been hospitalized until this year. She said she intended to get the vaccine, but a diagnosis of breast cancer in February, followed by surgery and radiation therapy to eradicate it, caused her to postpone the vaccine.

She said she was also nervous about putting her health at risk after a parent suffered a stroke shortly after receiving the vaccine. She knows most people have mild side effects, if any, but she was still hesitant. The vaccines have been shown to be safe in studies and used in more than half of the American population and are much less risky than the virus itself.

“I had my follow-up, I had the courage to do my vaccine, and I had COVID instead,” said Lubrano, who called it the scariest moment of his life. “You take breathing for granted. … When you sit down and can’t breathe air into your lungs… it’s so scary, and I don’t want anyone to have to feel that.

Lubrano said her husband fell ill first and was hospitalized while she was in quarantine at home. He has since been released and is recovering at home, still on oxygen, she said.

Since his hospitalization, Lubrano’s entire family – his daughters, sisters and their spouses – have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

“I made it my mission to make sure no one suffered this way,” she said, an oxygen tube attached to her nose. “Everyone must be vaccinated. We will never beat it any other way.

Davis, the neurologist who was forced to take on extra chores in the latest wave of coronavirus, says she can’t stress enough the importance of getting the vaccine. She remembers a year ago, before vaccines were available, helplessly witnessing the deaths of friends and neighbors.

“These were people who didn’t stand a chance,” she said. “There was nothing we could do to stop this for them. You have a chance now. You have something that gives you the opportunity to have a destiny that is not like theirs. Please don’t waste it.