SMALL MOMENTS HAD DEEPEST RESONANCE
I was no stranger to writing about infectious disease when the novel coronavirus arrived one year ago. There was the H1N1 novel flu in 2009, Disneyland’s measles outbreak in 2014 and 2015, San Diego’s hepatitis A scare in 2017 and the shiga toxin-producing E. coli outbreak at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in 2019 — not to mention following the annual cycle of seasonal influenza. But, coronavirus, obviously, has been something very different.
In addition to its demonstrated ability to force most humans to wear masks, this virus seems to have a mutation that makes it capable of generating news in the early evening, month after month, grinding deadlines to dust and swallowing up Saturdays like Skittles.
While it surely has been interesting to watch the numbers change, I find that the most arresting moments spent covering this pandemic have come inside our local hospitals. We’ve been in 10 different facilities, several more than once, and I find that things that stick with me are not the interviews but simply watching people, thrust into a situation they cannot control, back each other up.
I remember the precise gloved hands of nurses, technicians and therapists “proning” an intubated and sedated ICU patient at Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center on April 10. Pulling and prodding, they turned the patient onto his stomach to increase the air flow in his lungs, their eyes flashing with delight when his oxygen monitor reading jumped almost immediately.
It’s hard to forget the sound of a hospital bed rapidly bouncing through the hallways at Scripps Mercy in Chula Vista on April 23, a gravely ill woman with cratered oxygen levels aboard for the mad scramble to a negative pressure room in the ICU for immediate intubation. Watching ICU workers don their personal protective equipment, checking each other for mistakes, felt a little like watching a SWAT team gear up to enter a hostile house.
It made me remember that professionals aren’t just good, they’re fast. On May 20, I saw a doctor pause a nurse on the floor in the ER at El Centro Medical Center, stopping to help her wipe down a hard-to-reach spot on her yellow hazmat suit, one that had just seen her through the harrowing rush of COVID-19 patients that came streaming in about a week after Mother’s Day.
On June 7, I witnessed a whole group of people — more than six, maybe 10 — lunge forward as one to keep just enough slack in the forest of medical lines connected to an inbound patient at Jacobs Medical Center who needed extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) therapy. They managed to get him from a paramedic gurney to a CT scanner sled and then into a hospital bed without dislodging those lines, a good thing given that two of them were literally carrying his entire blood supply outside his body. I think I’ll always remember perfusionist Rance Duyan cradling that ECMO machine like a baby. It had a hand crank on the top so that he could manually keep the blood flowing if the electric pumps failed.
These are just a few of the memories that stand out when I think back over the past year, and none made it out of my notebook. Taken together, though, I think they show the camaraderie that this pandemic has instilled in many places. Solidarity has soared not just in hospitals but in all walks of life, whether it’s delivery drivers bringing what we need when we need it or neighbors helping neighbors who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own.
As we come out of this situation and begin to find ways to prevent it from happening again, we’ll be fools if we don’t find ways to learn from all those who pulled together and brought us through.
Watching ICU workers don their personal protective equipment felt a little like watching a SWAT team gear up to enter a hostile house.