LIFE AND DEATH ON FRONTLINE - ED NURSE
NURSE PLEADS WITH PEOPLE TO HEED PUBLIC HEALTH RESTRICTIONS
AN emergency nurse at Our Lady of Lourdes hospital has made an impassioned plea for people to please heed Level 5 restrictions to halt the rampant spread of COVID-19.
Eadaoin O’Callaghan says she and her colleagues are being put in the impossible position of choosing who to treat first, such is the pressure under which they are being placed.
The Monaghan native describes the emotionally draining aftermath of a 12-anda-half-hour shift last weekend during one ‘of my worst days in my career to date’.
‘Every day is a learning day and I love my job, but today I couldn’t wait to get out of the place,’ she said, saying she never cries, but she did twice that day. ‘ We were overcrowded in the COVID area - patients sitting on chairs, trolleys, people sitting in every free space possible, patients sitting out by doors, on corridors, ambulance crew coming in with patients on stretchers with nowhere to put them, patients coming in with shortness of breath - no cubicle to put them in.’
She says they try to prioritise but when everyone is COVID positive and everyone is very sick, it is a struggle.
‘With most needing intravenous fluids, antibiotics, nebulisers, steroids and some needing CPAP (Continuous positive airway pressure) and BIPAP (Bilevel Positive Airway Pressure), how do you determine who needs it most?
‘ The patient who has Stage 4 lung cancer or the elderly frail lady who has chronic COPD? There’s no end and truth be told it will be a while before there is an end’.
With local and national COVID numbers now completely out of control, there have been more cases reported in the Republic in the past two weeks, than in the first entire eight months of the pandemic here.
Nationwide, there are now 1,575 people in hospital with COVID, 85 of those in our local hospital.
One in every 45 people in the county has tested positive for the virus in the last 14 days, and that does not include East Meath.
The nurse-to-patient ratio in OLOL is now one nurse to nine patients, and Eadaoin is pleading for people to stay at home and protect each other.
‘I understand it’s very hard to listen to the information of ‘stay home’ and ‘isolate’ but look at it this way, when you make the decisions you do, everyone is affected,’ she says.
‘Is it your granny you want to see in our overcrowded Emergency Department with possibly no ideal place for her to go? Your neighbour? Your Dad? Your pregnant wife? Your best friend? Your child? Is it these people you want in here with us? These people who probably won’t get the high-quality care that they deserve but unfortunately, we can’t give them because were transferring patients to the ward, trying to get the heart rate of the next patient to slow down or they will/could have a cardiac arrest any minute followed by running to the lady who is 12/40 weeks pregnant who is actively miscarrying and needs to be rushed to theatre’?
‘Please if anything, listen to the advice and keep your people safe. This is no joke. This is happening around us.’