At hospital, ‘Christmas is going to be very difficult’
El Camino’s nurses, doctors, support staff coping with surge of COVID-19 patients
MOUNTAIN VIEW » It’s beginning to look a lot like another grueling day in the COVID-19 ward at El Camino Health’s Mountain View hospital.
And as if 2020’s cruelty hasn’t been bad enough, El Camino — like hospitals across California — has never been busier with COVID-19 patients, just in time for the holidays.
“Christmas is going to be very difficult,” said longtime nurse Barbara Callens, who refused to let her guard down Tuesday while gowning up before entering a room in the hospital’s COVID-19 critical care unit.
The health care workers know too well how weary and restless everyone — inside and out of the hospital — is with stay-home orders and business closures. So the nurses and doctors and support staff are finding their sanity through little routines and turning to each other for empathy to get through a pandemic that has turned into a ruthless marathon.
Callens plays with her rescue pup Roxie when she’s not caring for some of Silicon Valley’s sickest patients and dreams of cutting through white powder on the ski slopes to help her cope.
Chief Nursing Officer Cheryl Reinking sneaks in a 5:30 a.m. run near her home in Los Altos before the sun comes up to clear her head. And chaplain John Harrison, accustomed to tending to patients and their families, is spending more time comforting fatigued doctors
and nurses who have spent nearly a year battling the deadly virus with no end in sight. Long gone are the days when they were showered with donated meals and nightly cheers from an appreciative public early in the pandemic.
This is the reality of Christmas week here and at hospitals across the Bay Area.
Just days before the holiday, as shoppers scrambled to scoop up last-minute presents and prep holiday meals, El Camino was caring for more COVID-19 patients than at any other point in the last 10 months — 56, including 12 requiring intensive care. Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Wednesday that California hospitals as a whole were reporting just over 1% of ICU beds available. Nearly 19,000 Californians were hospitalized with the coronavirus, more than double three weeks ago and another new record.
Perhaps nowhere is the harsh reality of the pandemic more visible than the ICU where Callens spends hour after hour fighting to keep patients on the brink of death alive and their desperate families, “just grasping for a picture of what’s happening,” in the loop.
“It’s been very challenging, because they’re so fragile and things can change in just moments,” Callens said in the middle of a 12hour shift as she suited up — painstakingly pulling on a gown and gloves, hairnet and air purifying helmet, mask and face shield — to flip a coronavirus patient from his back to his stomach to help him breathe better
arlier in the summer, she might have said she felt more comfortable than at the beginning of the pandemic in a COVID-19 ward, but not now, not with reports of a new, more contagious strain of the deadly virus out of the United Kingdom and the steady, seemingly endless, flow of new patients to treat.
“Just when you put your guard down,” she said, “things change.”
The virus has robbed patients of the comforting touch and presence of loved ones, and foisted new roles — from stand-in family member to spiritual adviser — onto fatigued health care workers across the country.
“It’s very different to wear all of those hats,” said Reinking, sporting a sweater with fluffy ornament balls in an effort to be festive even as she grew momentarily teary. “Our nurses are very resilient and they’ve stepped up.”
Despite the gloom, there were signs of Christmas everywhere: Holiday wreaths and twinkling trees dotted the Mountain View hospital lobby. A woman played soothing carols on a grand piano. Somebody stuck a shiny star atop the robot that delivers medical supplies. And nurses cut snowflakes from white printer paper and hung them on windows even though their critically ill COVID-19 patients were not alert enough to notice.
As it has for others, the pandemic has upended Harrison’s work, forcing him to rethink what it means to be a chaplain in a time that calls for physical distancing.
“If you told me a year ago that I’d be using Zoom, I would have laughed at you,” Harrison said. “But here we are.”
Recently, he spotted a coworker approaching him in the hall. Above her mask, her eyes ref lected deep pain. Her mother had just been admitted to a different hospital and was battling for her life even as her daughter fought to keep others alive miles away. He listened, mostly, and tried to provide some comfort, some reassurance that she was not alone.
“It’s certainly more intense” around the holidays, he said.
There are bright spots, of course. The arrival of vaccines has lifted spirits. The hospital was fortunate to get 55 traveling nurses to offer some relief, while other medical centers have scrambled for help. For the moment, there’s enough personal protective gear like masks and gloves to go around. And Reinking tries to boost morale however she can. On Sunday, she pushed a snack cart through the halls doling out individually wrapped chocolate bars and Goldfish packs.
“The snack that smiles back,” she chuckled, referring to the popular cracker’s marketing gimmick. “People loved it.”
For Daniel Shin, an infectious disease specialist at the hospital who treated one of the first cases involving community spread in late February, the early, uncertain days of the pandemic have given way to something more akin to Groundhog Day. And while the grim routine means building up more expertise to rely on in the battle against COVID-19, “it’s the same thing over and over,”
Shin said.
But now, after a surge in cases after Thanksgiving, that “same thing” has pushed hospitals to the brink.
In a small, quiet room packed with monitors displaying graphs and charts tracking everything from emergenc y room wait times to patient discharges lies the heart of El Camino Hospital’s capacity management center. And in the “queen’s chair” sits Linda Copeland, who has had just about every role imaginable at the hospital over more than four decades and who now is tasked with keeping track, by the minute, of what is happening where and who needs what.
“It’s busier,” she said, an understatement belied by her constantly ringing phone and a morning schedule packed with a flurry of meetings and huddles and unit visits — and always those monitors.
Reinking’s days are jampacked, too, and constantly shifting depending on the patient load and an endless array of other factors.
Still, while the pandemic has been unlike “anything I would dream would happen” in nursing school, she said, “I feel like we’ve had a good plan.”
And her focus remains on the ultimate goal — the most challenging, most important, most constant task, day in and day out: Supporting patients — and the medical crew valiantly working to save them — from “feeling vulnerable, anxious and fatigued.”