Worried about patients, and spreading the virus
Leigh Walters, 51
• Respiratory therapist • Royal Jubilee Hospital • On the job 18 years • Married, two sons 12, 14
When a Code Blue is called over a hospital intercom, “things are really bad,” says respiratory therapist Leigh Walters.
It’s typically an impending cardiac or respiratory arrest. In her younger days, she would have felt an adrenaline rush. It’s different now: “At this point in my life, I always think: That’s awful.”
Walters has enough experience intubating and extubating patients, giving CPR and assessing people unable to breathe that she doesn’t need that adrenaline to power through.
Those first few weeks intubating COVID-19 patients were “incredibly stressful,” she says, as no one knew enough about the disease. After performing an intubation, she’d worry about spreading the virus.
“I was anxious. That anxiety and those early days of doing those intubations was something that I found very challenging.”
She didn’t realize the toll it was taking until she found herself waking at 3 a.m. after bad dreams.
Although she took every precaution not to bring the virus home, she soon made the decision with her wife and her two children to self-isolate. “My kids are young and my wife, I was concerned about her.”
One of the things that sets COVID-19 apart is how quickly a patient can deteriorate, she says. “We need to act really quickly, in a very controlled manner.
“We’re shutting things down, we’re putting on negative pressure, we’re all getting into our gear and we’re doing things with a very specific process that’s developed to ensure that we are safe, that our patients are safe, and that the rest of the emergency department is safe.
It’s hard, she says: As with other health-care workers, her impulse is “just to go. That’s the nature of respiratory therapy. We just go and we do.”
Walters says she is grateful to live on an island where people have taken the measures needed to keep infection rates low. And she’s a fan of the woman at the helm in this pandemic: “Dr. Henry … she is my source of truth.”
The threat of a surge or another, bigger wave rarely leaves her mind.
Her worst fear is that a work colleague will become infected. But she says no one will walk away unaffected by the pandemic.
“I think for all health-care workers, this will leave a little bit of a mark.”