LIFE AND DEATH IN FROST 19
Inside Christus St. Vincent’s COVID-19 ward, front-line workers and patients alike wage emotionally fraught battle for survival
It was around 3:30 in the afternoon when the applause began.
Nurses at Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center began cheering as the wheelchair bearing a patient rolled though the hallway of Frost 19, the name the hospital has given its COVID-19 ward. This was no golf clap celebration; the emotion was real, heartfelt. Next stop for this patient was home. Relief. And, hopefully, health. But less than 10 minutes later, in the same hallway, came another sound. The unmistakable zip of a white body bag.
It was the denouement of a fight against COVID-19 that had been lost. This is life and death in Frost 19.
Peel beneath the layers of grim numbers, difficult-to-fathom policies, news conferences and news releases, and this is the reality of the coronavirus pandemic, now in its ninth month — an endless battle in which the essence of human existence reveals itself, seemingly at random — both to those fighting the disease and those struggling to keep them alive.
Units like Frost 19, intensive care wards packed with COVID-19 patients, create the strongest of bonds.
“We’re like soldiers on a battlefield,” said Bre Slaughter, a critical care nurse at the hospital. “But we’re not fighting with bullets or bombs. We’re fighting with blood, sweat and ventilators.”
Clad in layers of protective gear — two pairs of gloves on each hand, face shields, masks and the like — the team at Christus St. Vincent wins a lot of the clashes. But it also has lost: 41 people have died of COVID-19 there.
The odds are not getting easier. As of Friday, 30 patients were in Frost 19, which has the capacity to hold up to 43 patients. In some ways, the picture looks better there than elsewhere: On Friday, the state Department of Health said just 42 intensive care unit beds were available statewide, and some hospitals in Albuquerque said earlier this month they were beyond capacity.
Amid the swelling numbers, the people who work in the unit tell hard-to-hear stories about the fights that have been lost. Some talk about the swirl of emotions as they hold the hand of a patient who is dying and would otherwise be alone, for family members cannot visit the ward. The human touch is provided by a staff member. The goodbyes come courtesy of an internet connection on an iPad.
“There’s been multiple deaths,” said Jamie Anaya, a clinical supervisor and respiratory therapist in the ward. “The only way someone gets a sense of closure is to watch a total stranger — one of us — hold the hands of their loved ones. They don’t get to do that. They can’t reach out and touch them. They have to watch it on a computer screen.
“I don’t know how people are processing this,” Anaya says. “I couldn’t let this be the end for my family.”
And so it goes. Life here. Death there. A fight everywhere.
And yet, for all the despair, people who work in Frost 19 also like to talk about the stories of hope and survival — tales of success of those who will leave to rousing applause.
A Christmas wish
Christopher Martinez says he will be one of those people. The 44-year-old Clayton resident fell ill with the respiratory virus Thanksgiving Day.
Severe pain, nausea and desperate gasps for air let him know something was terribly wrong.
The next night, he was flown to Santa Fe. He awoke in Frost 19, in severe pain.
“Please don’t let me die,” he recalls telling the nurse who tended to him. “I have too much to live for.”
He can’t recall which nurse was there that morning, but she comforted him: “We’re gonna take care of you, you’re doing good.”
Now, breathing with the help of tube called a nasal cannula, he uses his cellphone to tell his father and three children — all of whom he cares for while also working as the night auditor at the Best Western Kokopelli Lode in Clayton — they should not worry.
“I will beat this and I will be home,” he told them. “Just pray for me and I’ll be there.”
Though Martinez says he always wore a mask at work, sometimes hotel visitors did not. He wonders if he contracted the virus from one of them.
Martinez’s brush with death has made him thankful for the simple things in life. He talks of how, as a child, around Christmas, he would receive a brown paper bag of mixed nuts, fruit, candy and maybe a quarter or half-dollar as a gift. He realizes now how such a modest offering made him feel like he had a purpose.
His mind briefly raced over the idea that he could do the same thing when he returns to Clayton: fill dozens of such bags with fruit, candy, half-dollars, maybe dollar bills, and give them out to children.
“If I were to get out early this year, before Christmas, I would do that,” he says, looking at the various tattoos adorning his arms, including some featuring the footprints of his three children and their birth dates.
“Sometimes I’ll forget their date of birth, so I’ll look here,” he says, a smile helping to wipe away the tears that started when he thought back to his childhood.
“This makes you love and appreciate stuff more than you had before,” he says through more tears. “I’ve got to go back. My father, my kids . ... ”
As Martinez talks, Frost 19 team members pop in and out of rooms to check on their charges on a regular basis. They work 12-hour shifts, three or four days a week. At best, they get one 45-minute break a day, Anaya says.
Sometimes, they laugh, goof around with a Groot doll and enjoy the various masks some of their colleagues wear for fun — clinical supervisor Geoffrey Tolentino donned a Darth Vader mask, for example, on Thursday.
Other times, they say, are more somber. The tears seem to come as often for staff members as for patients.
“I probably cry 10 times a shift, depending on
what’s going on,” says respiratory therapist Crystal Diaz, who has been working at the hospitaal for five or six years.
In some ways, the isolation brought on by COVID-19 is not reserved for just patients. It’s real for staff members as well.
Kim Miller, a licensed practical nurse in the unit, says she now avoids her friends, hikiing only with her dogs, Pearl, Olive and Lily.
“I’ve seen how awful and unpredictable this virus can be,” she says.
Like many others in health care, Miller believes that if people just stuck to practicing preventive measures like wearing masks and maintaiining social distancing, “We could get some level of control over this.”
The hardest thing about the job, she says, is when she does everything in her power, including prayer, to try to save a patient and it’s not enough
“We all develop bonds with different patients and some of them hit a little harder,” she says “Because you become their family.”
On the other hand, she said, she and her Frost 19
colleagues have an out: “We get to go home.”
A window to the world
Down the hall and around a corner, there’s a spacious waiting room transformed into a place to store equipment for the fight, including ventilators. It’s the place many of the medical team members go to look out the expansive window at the sunset, the passing traffic on St. Michael’s Drive, the rabbits darting aboout the ground below.
For Anaya, it’s a place for tears, but also where she can read the inspiring messages, written with a black marker, that people have been inscribing on the window.
“All we need is love,” someone wrote. Below it, another author added, “And alcohol,” fresh air, sunshine and to be COVID-free.”
Anaya — who recently sat with one of her patients in his 70s, a “grandpacita,” as he died — says she often comes to this room. Outside the window, she likes to “remember that life is still happening out there.”
The 34-year-old, who says she stumbled into respiratory therapy after studying to be an accountant and a veterinary technician, loves her work. The often tiring experience of fighting the virus has made her appreciate her mother, partner and others in her life.
The best thing about the Frost 19 unit, she says, is “working with people I love and admire. It’s built a bond between all of us. It’s like, ‘You thought you would rely on your coworkers? Now you know you can rely on your coworkers.’ We’ve become each other’s sisters, brothers.”
Nurse Slaughter jokingly refers to the Frost 19 group as “the most dysfunctional, cohesive family you will ever meet. It’s like going home at Thanksgiving and we all pick on each other because we’ve known each other all our lives, but we’re cohesive in that if we have an emergency, everybody knows what to do and we come together to do it perfectly.”
Still, Slaughter wonders sometimes if they aren’t selling “broken promises” — reassuring patients they’re going to be OK when they’re not sure that’s how it will play out.
There are no guarantees.
Most of the people who work here believe the virus one day will no longer be a threat and life will return to something similar to normal. They say life and death in Frost 19 will make them better medical professionals and, hopefully, better people.
But Anaya wonders if there won’t be personal repercussions for some of them, akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. Yes, many have seen death in the hospital before, but not on this scale, not hitting so fast and so hard and so suddenly. Some of those who died didn’t quite understand why it was happening to them, she says.
It’s a heavy burden to hear. To bear. Looking out the window as the sun begins to set, Anaya looks forward to the day when the Frost 19 unit doesn’t have to do this anymore.
“We have to come out the other side of this tunnel. We can’t stay here, we can’t keep this,” she says. “Something will change, something has to change. You have to keep that sense of hope alive.”