Please stay off my list
UNMH doctor sees the young people struggling on ventilators, the folks out without masks, and worries
I get up in the morning and pour myself a cup of coffee. A bit of milk, no sugar. One slice of toast, some butter and a spoonful of honey.
I’m all set.
I open up my laptop and log in to the hospital system. There it is. The day’s list. The list is of patients who came up positive in the University of New Mexico Hospital (UNMH) over the past day. Some of them came in for a test in the Emergency Department’s new Respiratory Care Center. Perhaps they were exposed to someone with COVID-19, or they had a fever and a cough, or they just wanted some reassurance they didn’t have “the virus.” Others on the list are patients who have been admitted to special COVID-19 wards or to the Intensive Care Unit.
I read through the charts and make mental notes as I do so. I am struck by how young many of the patients are in the ICU. Some are in their 20s or 30s. Now they are on a breathing machine, fighting for each breath, fighting to get through another day.
My job is to go through the list and to find the ones who have not been admitted to the hospital, the ones who got to go home. I call them to give them their results and to see how they are doing. Some are shocked to learn they are positive. Others were expecting it, and the news is met with a casual, “Oh, OK.” But no one is happy to hear from me. I’m used to that.
I try to get a sense of how things are going for them, who they live with, who else might have been exposed. Everyone gets referred to our new COVID-19 Follow-up Clinic. “You’ll get a phone call in a couple of days, just to see how things are going,” I tell them. We go over things to look for, reasons to come back to the hospital. Most will do fine at home, but some of them will have to come back. The complicated cases — people who are living in a group home, or maybe half the family is positive and half the family is negative — they go to the New Mexico Department of Health for follow-up, to see if alternative lodging arrangements can be made or if more intensive testing of contacts can be carried out. There are lots of moving parts during a pandemic, and each case is different.
All around me I can see that Albuquerque is relaxing a bit. Stores are opening, people are out and about. People need to work, and I am glad that we are opening up, but it makes me nervous. Still, I’m glad to get to the nursery and grab a few rose bushes. Not everyone is wearing a mask, and not everyone is keeping their distance. I wonder if I will be seeing more people on my list, and more young people on breathing machines? I have been a physician for over 30 years, and I have never seen anything like this virus. I worry.
I worry, and I also wonder. For reasons that I simply cannot understand, wearing a mask has become a political statement. Defiance of public health measures has become, for some, a form of patriotism. Are we asking too much, that people wear a mask out in public, and that we limit our social interactions until we have a better handle on this virus? I don’t believe so. So I ask you to please be a responsible citizen and don’t endanger those about you. Wear a mask. Keep your distance. Please stay off my list.