My 60-hour shift in the ER during Hurricane Harvey
I was on call at St. Luke’s when the major flooding began. I decided to stay in the hospital, along with many other residents, attendings, nurses and support staff.
It turns out that a hospital is a fantastic place to be in a crisis — it has food, water, electricity, even Wi-Fi. I ended up staying there until Monday, taking shifts with other residents as we watched over our patients. We even saw some new ones who somehow managed to make their way through floodwaters to the emergency room.
Here are some of the things I saw during those 60 hours.
I saw nurses working for almost 20 hours straight and managing way more patients than usual, refusing to leave them — they didn’t know when the next nurses would arrive.
I saw the cafeteria transformed into a support station with round-the-clock free meals. The lunch tables transformed into war rooms as the various medical departments strategized about how to staff the hospital despite being desperately under capacity. I got meals from the same cafeteria worker — Anne — on Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday evening, Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Monday morning.
I saw patients placed in impossible circumstances. One, a young man with a son in the ICU at Texas Children’s, recently heard that his house
had flooded. He was having high fevers and coughing up yellow sputum. His chest X-ray showed he had developed a lobar pneumonia. He was pale and clammy, with bloodshot eyes.
“Doc, I need go,” he told me. “I have to see my son. I have to call my wife and make sure she’s safe. I can’t stay here.”
I was in the ICU when an impromptu meeting was held to discuss the fact that no relief would be able to come in for the foreseeable future. There were only two attendings, each taking 12-hour shifts so the other could sleep. They’d already been working for 48 hours.
Midway through one of the shifts, one of the sleeping ICU doctors woke up and asked the active doctor if he was OK.
“I’m cruising,” he said, smiling. He was bleary-eyed and weary, but it didn’t matter. “I’m rolling,” he said and gave a thumbs-up. “I’m good to go.” My fiancée, who also is a doctor, told me that one of her patients wanted to meet me after they found out that their doctor had a significant other in the hospital.
“Sure,” I said, and went over to the room. They were so appreciative of her care that they invited us to go fishing with them in Corpus Christi when this was all over. “I’m telling you, you’ve never seen a more beautiful place to fish your entire life. You’ll stay with us, of course! It won’t cost you a penny.”
The man took out his iPhone and showed us pictures of a gorgeous coastline, Texas-sized sunsets and smiling nephews proudly holding up fish as big as they were. “We’ll make it down there,” he said. “We’ll get through this.”
Finally, on Monday morning, the first wave of relief arrived, and those whose houses hadn’t flooded and had clear streets were able to go home. Others weren’t so lucky.
The Texas Medical Center is what brought me to Houston. It has more medical schools, hospitals and nursing facilities per square foot than any other place on earth. It was incredible to see the resiliency, camaraderie and selflessness of those who work there in a crisis. Learning about what to do in a crisis is standard in medical education. But to see it in action, to see people refusing to leave until they knew their patients would be cared for, is something else entirely.
It’s been a grim few days, and the worst is not over. We don’t know how many more casualties there might be. Untold billions in property damage has already been done. But Houstonians showed their true colors over this past weekend. I’ve never been prouder to be a Texan.