Storm-uprooted dialysis patients in limbo
Hurricanes crippled Caribbean’s ability to provide hemodialysis
CHAMBLEE, Ga. — Juanita Edwards’ children, grandchildren and pets are waiting for her back home on St. Croix. The island air would be salty and familiar: Before the monster storms of 2017, she had never left the Caribbean.
But if she went home now, she would quickly die.
Edwards, 84, requires regular treatment for kidney failure, and the hurricanes that devastated the Caribbean last year crippled the region’s ability to provide hemodialysis, the artificial blood-cleansing process that can substitute for faltering kidneys. More than 200 dialysis patients like Edwards had to be evacuated in September from the U.S. Virgin Islands to distant places where they could be treated — and they have been far from home ever since.
“It’s rough on her,” Gloria Edwards, Edwards’ daughter and primary caregiver, said as her mother dozed in the extendedstay hotel room they share in the Atlanta metropolitan area, where many of the evacuees remain. “She wants to go home. She wants to go home now.”
Federal health officials felt they had little choice, a decision reinforced as months have dragged on with halting recovery and little progress in restoring medical services in the Virgin Islands. “We don’t do paramedical evacuation often, and we certainly don’t do it on this scale,” said Capt. Charles Weir of the U.S. Public Health Service, who is a regional emergency coordinator in Atlanta with the office of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response. “The only option for those dialysis clients was to find dialysis services elsewhere. Given that they’re U.S. citizens, that first option is us.”
Hurried relocations
Many of the patients had to be evacuated repeatedly. At least 130 dialysis patients from St. Thomas and St. John in the Virgin Islands were moved to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Irma in early September; as Hurricane Maria approached Puerto Rico two weeks later, around 100 of them were transferred to Florida, and then again to Atlanta. Maria’s development into a Category 5 storm that devastated St. Croix forced yet another hurried relocation.
The 138 dialysis patients in Atlanta came as part of a larger federal program of medical evacuations that transported 531 patients from the Virgin Islands to the mainland for treatment, about half of them with an accompanying family member. Forty-one of the evacuated patients, many of whom arrived critically ill, have died, including 15 dialysis patients, who as a group often have other medical problems besides kidney failure.
The program, known as the National Disaster Medical System, has been used for years to transport hospital patients out of disaster zones for treatment in unaffected hospitals. They usually are returned home quickly afterward. But officials said that the dialysis patients from the Virgin Islands have presented new challenges, because of their continuing requirement for outpatient treatment and because medical care is only one of their many needs.
Gloria Edwards praised the efforts of emergency workers in helping her mother. But the process of making metropolitan Atlanta an evacuation site for the medically needy was marked by substantial hurdles and occasional missteps.
“They arrived in the middle of the night at the military base,” said Micheline Desse, a group facility administrator for DaVita, a dialysis company that has worked with the government. “They needed them to have dialysis the next day.”
Desse was asked to arrange care for 64 of the patients. She called every dialysis facility in her region to see how many could be accommodated; in many cases the answer was none.
She got better news from a clinic that could take 40 patients. Staff members agreed to work longer hours and established an additional shift for dialysis.
But there were logistical problems. Some patients were placed in hotels far from their clinic, or would not be picked up on schedule, or would get back late and miss meals at their hotels. Patients had problems filling prescriptions. Federal officials serving brief rotations on the program were turned over frequently, and important information would sometimes be lost in the transitions.
Services still hobbled
Juanita Edwards weeps at the thought of never returning to Christiansted, the island’s largest town.
But it is not clear when she will be able to go back. Before the storm, there were just two main dialysis clinics in St. Croix. Treatment at a dialysis center requires clean water, reliable electricity, trained staff, and, because the procedure typically involves tapping into major blood vessels, the ability to transport a patient swiftly to a functioning hospital for emergency care if something should go wrong. It is a hard bill to fill now on St. Croix.
Medical services in the Virgin Islands are still severely hobbled, with hundreds of staff members laid off from damaged hospitals, many types of specialty care unavailable, and emergency rooms overflowing. Modular hospital units have been ordered but will take months to arrive, and even temporary dialysis trailers and portable operating rooms are not expected for several more weeks.
“Right now, for any individual that has a high acuity health problem, we have to evacuate them off the island,” said Michelle Davis, the Virgin Islands health commissioner. She said some patients had returned home only to be reevacuated. “It’s way too much on the patient in terms of the stress,” she said.