Christmas in ICU mixes decorations with tears
OPELIKA, Ala. – A Christmas tree stands outside the intensive care room where a man stricken by COVID-19 lies unconscious, a machine breathing for him. A few feet away, a plastic snowman adorns the door of another patient whose face is barely visible behind ventilator tubes.
The decorations are “a way to let family members know that we’re trying, and we love these patients and we want them to feel like it’s Christmas as much as we can,” nurse Carla Fallin said, standing just outside one of the rooms at East Alabama Medical Center.
While parades, shopping and Christmas tree lightings go on around them, nurses and doctors who’ve spent agonizing months caring for the ill are doing what they can to get through the holiday season, which many fear will only spread the disease and add to the U.S. death toll that has surpassed 320,000.
The medical center about 60 miles northeast of Montgomery faces a new influx of COVID-19 patients as the pandemic intensifies. That means staff members can hang decorations on patients’ doors in the ICU but cannot attend after-work Christmas parties. A cheerful Santa doll stands atop the desk at a nursing station, but big gatherings with relatives are out.
A nurse for five years, Fallin said Christmas just doesn’t feel right this year. She and her husband did not take their two young sons to local Christmas events that drew hundreds of people, many without masks. The decorations in the ICU help lighten the mental load a little, she said, if only until another patient nears death.
Just as in other places across the country, a surge in infections linked to Thanksgiving is now filling up beds at the hospital. With vaccines not yet available to the general public, hospital officials dread what might happen in January after families board airplanes and spend hours gathered around dinner tables or Christmas trees.
Amid so much suffering and after so many tears, any ray of brightness helps, even if it’s just a candy cane sticker on a ICU window, said Dr. Meshia Wallace, a pulmonary physician who works in critical care.
“Families come in, and all they’re getting for the most part is bad news: ‘Your family member is sick, they’ve moved down from the seventh floor to the ICU,’ ” she said. “A little bit of Christmas cheer is not going to hurt. It can only help.”
Wallace is skipping her usual Christmas gathering and hopes to spend the holiday with an aunt who might drive over from Atlanta. Dr. Ricardo Maldonado, who leads the pandemic response team at East Alabama, knows exactly what he will do for the holiday.
“Work,” Maldonado said after visiting patients on a hospital floor full of COVID-19 patients. “There is so much work.”
The nonprofit hospital has had to bring in nearly 60 traveling nurses to shore up staffing that has been depleted, yet requests to take on additional COVID-19 patients still come in most days from neighboring states, said chief executive Laura Grill.
Some workers have been sickened by the virus, she said, and others retired or quit. Many, she said, are simply exhausted, both physically and emotionally, and the Christmas season isn’t making things easier.
“I sat in a meeting two days ago with the nurse manager of our ICU and she just cried. She said, ‘We don’t know what else to do. We can look at this patient and know that they are not going to get better,’ ” Grill said.