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CRANSTON, RI – Nicholas DiPompo was finally coming home.
Gripping his cane, the 78-year-old former property manager, who had spent weeks battling COVID-19 at a Rhode Island field hospital, got into a wheelchair and screamed in the hallway.
“You have my number,” DiPompo shouted at compatriot Art Singleton, whom he had grown up with after three weeks together. “Call me when you go out.” He said they would go to his favorite restaurant for some baked stuffed lobster.
Singleton, 56, sat in his wheelchair and saw a nurse push his friend down the makeshift hallway. Another nurse pulled DiPompo’s oxygen tank behind him, past a long row of blue curtains, a bed behind each.
“We were at the bottom,” DiPompo said of his friendship with Singleton, a pizza restaurant worker who had lost part of a leg to diabetes. “He had no feet, I had heart disease.”
Then DiPompo left, coming out of a field hospital built in a former Citizens Bank call center, in a two-story office building on a busy shopping street. The nonprofit Care New England health network opened Kent Field Hospital on November 30, just before Rhode Island’s infection rate became the highest in the world. Kent Hospital was using all of its beds for its sickest COVID-19 patients and needed a place for the overflow. Now other hospitals sometimes send patients to the field hospital.
Rhode Island’s infection rate has since declined, and many of the 335 field hospital beds are now empty. On calm days, medical staff wish they could do more.
Only stable and unintubated COVID-19 patients are transferred a few kilometers to the field hospital, and only if they consent. Some refuse. The idea of a field hospital may conjure up images of giant tents in a war zone, canvas sides flapping in the wind.
It is none of those things. A $ 6 million renovation turned the office building into a modern hospital for less ill COVID patients, with negative pressure air ducts snaking along the ceilings, causing airborne contagions.
About 200 patients have passed through the field hospital, most only spending a few days before returning home to complete their recovery. Unlike a regular hospital ward, where COVID patients cannot leave their rooms, patients are free to move around.
With a low number of patients, medical staff pay close attention to each person: helping them walk the halls to improve lung capacity, stretching stiff feet, handing out popsicles, coloring pictures with a man old man, cutting Singleton’s hair.
Relatives drop off fresh clothes and food, even bringing enough pizza once for all staff and patients. Table bells, the kind once ubiquitous at hotel reception, sit beside each bed to call nurses.
Then there’s what the staff call “the honeymoon suite,” the enclosed cabin where Peter and Pauline Sorrow are – well, hopefully – finishing their battles against the coronavirus.
Pierre, 62, and Pauline, 71, have been together for 25 years. The longest they’ve been separated were the five days Peter was first hospitalized in January for COVID-19. Since then, thanks to his recovery and relapse, he has been to the main hospital twice and is currently completing his second stay in the field hospital. For a few days after Pauline fell ill, they were right across from each other from the main hospital, isolated in their own negative pressure rooms, communicating by phone.
Pauline, who is still mostly bedridden, was elated when they rolled her bed next to Peter’s at the field hospital.
He now helps take care of her: open a stubborn lid on her lunch, clean a piece of food on her dress, update their family.
“He saved me,” she said. While the two are recovering steadily, Pauline is concerned that COVID-19 could still take them both.
“I sometimes wonder if we’re going to wake up and if we won’t be there,” she said.
In many ways, the calmer pace of the field unit is a welcome relief for the medical staff. Subrina Geer, 33, a nurse here on a temporary assignment, saw the disease ravage New York City last year.
It’s different: “It was a breath of fresh air to see how many patients we could get out,” she said.
Dr Paari Gopalakrishnan, who runs the field hospital, now thought they would be ready to shut it down. But with the main hospital still crowded with patients – many of whom have severe COVID-19 – it’s too early for that decision.
“What we basically did was throw the box on the road,” he said. The field hospital is “easy to close but very difficult to relight”.
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