A day at a hospital in Louisiana

Jefferson, Louisiana — Before the coronavirus surge, Robin Davis, a neurologist in Louisiana, focused on treating epilepsy patients, her specialty. Recently, as a record number of virus patients flooded her hospital, she undertook additional duties as nurses, janitor, and orderly.

“I provided a bed bath on Sunday, emptied the trash, changed sheets, and rolled the patient to an MRI,” said an overworked nurse at the Ochsner Medical Center in the suburbs of New Orleans with some relief. Davis, who came on a holiday to serve, said. Jefferson’s.

The rapidly expanding COVID-19 infection across the United States has once again become an overwhelming hospital, especially in hotspots such as Louisiana, which was hospitalized with a record number of coronaviruses last week. Currently, nearly 2,900 virus patients are hospitalized. Case numbers may not peak in the next few weeks, according to state health officials. Louisiana has the fourth lowest vaccination rate in the country, with over 37% of its population fully vaccinated.

Recent days in Oxner, healthcare providers rushed up and down the hall and stripped off their suits every time they entered a new area of ​​the building. In dozens of ICU rooms, a beeping machine pumps medicine into the system, and a ventilator pumps air into the weakened lungs, causing the patient to place a faint, immobile tube in the throat. Medical contractors brought in from other hospitals quickly got used to the new environment in a hurry to ease the burden on overweight staff.

“We try to provide as consistent care as possible, but we need more hands to do that,” Davis said. “One of the biggest problems for our nurses is that we have too many patients and we have to create a bed that didn’t exist before. We need to find a provider that wasn’t previously installed. there is.”

Overwhelming case load

Ochsner Health is Louisiana’s largest healthcare provider, with 40 healthcare facilities throughout the state. At Oxner’s facility, more than 1,000 people (about 40% of the coronavirus patients currently hospitalized in the state) are being treated. Approximately 200 of them are located on Jefferson’s main campus, with three floors of the hospital’s West Tower built as a care unit for coronavirus patients.

Resources are reaching limits across the state as hospitals begin to alienate people with other life-threatening emergencies, such as heart attacks and strokes. Elective surgery and other non-urgent care were interrupted.

Davis said she didn’t need as much help as Oxner’s slender nursing department. She said many of her recent duties include obtaining medicine for nurses and pushing patients into wheelchairs.

“If it puts pressure on the nurse, if it gives her time to do what she needs, that’s what we did,” she said. “Sunday was supposed to be a holiday with my kids, but I need help here. I want to tell the two boys that one day I did what I needed when I needed it. . “

Nurse helping nurse

In the intensive care unit of the Ochsner Medical Center, nurses Joan Blizzard and Arthur Bienvenu are trying to take care of each other with a coronavirus patient.

They tie each other’s gowns, barely tie medicines and machines in one word, and shuffle inside and outside the hospital room. Their eyes are the only part of the face that can be seen through the protective equipment.

For the past year and a half, Bienbene has taken care of patients and worked 50-60 hours a week surrounded by fellow staff to help deal with the loss of his father due to the virus last year.

He said he shared his father’s story with other sad families. For example, his father had been on ventilator for more than 20 days in the spring, and his family had to make a difficult decision to remove him.

“The result wouldn’t have been what he wanted,” Bienvenu said. “He doesn’t want to live with tracheostomy and PEG (feeding tube) and the seriousness of the situation, so we moved from progressive measures and a little dignity to comfort and respected what my father left behind. I decided to do it .. “

Bienbene said working with other families experiencing loss helped give him purpose during the most tragic times of his life.

“People will ask me,’Why are you still coming in?'” He said. “Do you know because these people need us? We have to stop this. Everyone has different paths through this. I’m around I’m blessed to be around people. That’s the only way I’m here. “

Critical care nurse Mary Lubrano has seen her colleague run up and down the corridor of the intensive care unit at Ochsner Medical Center while she is lying in a hospital bed with the virus. She was hospitalized for two weeks and counted, but suffered from hypoxia and had difficulty breathing.

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

Lubrano works in the critical room at St. Bernard Parish Hospital, an Oxner-operated facility near his home in Chalmette, and was first hospitalized before being transferred to the Jefferson campus.

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

“They are crushing their hips there, full of COVID patients, and nurses on the same schedule every day. They just come and go,” she said. “As a nurse, it’s all a repayment, so I can’t wait to get back there.”

This time is worse

According to Blizzard, the scale of this latest coronavirus epidemic is serious, primarily caused by the highly contagious delta mutants.

“This time, people get sick very quickly,” she said. “They talk to you and within a few hours we have multiple people at the bedside,” he carries out first aid. “I’m very scared.”

She said that if they survive, many will live with disabilities for years.

Bienvenu wants people to understand the seriousness of the current situation.

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

I wish they had been vaccinated

Jerome Batiste, a 26-year-old from New Orleans, said he rarely got sick and didn’t think he needed a coronavirus vaccine. He said he thought he had a strong immune system by experiencing the entire pandemic without getting infected.

Sitting by the window of the recovery room in one of Oxner’s COVID units and basking in the sun from a bench near the hospital bed, he not only wants to get the vaccine, but also vaccines everyone he knows. I asked you to get it. “And if they need someone to go with them, I’ll go.”

Batiste said he had visited a friend on a family trip to Disney World in the weeks before he got sick, although he didn’t know where he got the virus.

“It just happened,” he said. “It was sudden. I started coughing.”

He said he was taking over-the-counter cough medicine and wanted it to pass, but “it got worse and worse, I started vomiting a lot and couldn’t control anything.”

Since he was admitted to the hospital last week, he has been given vitamins, steroids, respiratory therapy and injections to prevent blood clots. He also developed a rare condition in which the muscle tissue of his body began to break and required a flush of the kidneys to prevent further illness.

Batiste said he was telling his family and friends not to be “comfortable” with the virus and to protect himself with shots.

“I didn’t take it as seriously as most young people do,” he said, a harbor with a tube for his medicine protruding from his right forearm. “It’s too safe to be vaccinated.”

Emergency nurse Mary Lubrano, who is currently infected with COVID-19, said she had never been hospitalized until this year. She said she intended to be vaccinated, but she postponed her firing after a February diagnosis of breast cancer followed by surgery and radiation therapy to eradicate it.

She also said she was nervous about threatening her health after her relatives had a stroke shortly after vaccination. She knows that most people have mild side effects, but she still hesitates. Vaccines have been shown to be safe in research, used in more than half of the US population, and at a much lower risk than the virus itself.

“I had the courage to follow up and get vaccinated, and instead got infected with COVID,” said Lubrano, who called it the scariest time of his life. “You naturally breathe … when you sit down and your lungs don’t get air … it’s so scary that you don’t want anyone to feel that way.”

Lubrano said her husband was first ill and was hospitalized while in isolation at home. She said he was subsequently released, recovering at home, and still taking oxygen.

Since her admission, the entire Lubrano family (daughters, sisters, and their spouses) has been vaccinated at least once.

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

Neurologist Davis, who was forced to take on additional duties during the recent surge in coronavirus, says the importance of vaccination cannot be fully emphasized. She recalls being helplessly watching the deaths of her friends and neighbors a year before the vaccine became available.

“They were people who didn’t have a chance,” she said. “There was nothing we could do to stop this for them. You now have a chance. You have something that gives you the opportunity to follow a different fate. Waste. please do not.”