Volunteer nurse’s aide in the south suburbs: ‘There is nothing like the loss of a mother ...’

Since Good Friday I have volunteered two nights a week as a nurse’s aide in the intensive care unit of Franciscan Health Olympia Fields, just south of Chicago. Almost all our ICU patients are COVID-19 positive. Here are some lessons I’ve learned on the front lines:

First, hospitals in hot zones

like Chicago are really slammed. During our 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. ICU shift on May 1, for example, four patients died and the unusually high work flow allowed me only two 10-minute breaks. Furthermore, two of the deaths were mothers. The grief of the sons who visited them afterward was palpable and deeply moving. There is nothing like the loss of a mother that can make a man of any age feel like a small lost boy, suddenly alone in the world.

A second lesson I have learned

on the front lines is that COVID-19 is more easily spreadable and lethal than an ordinary flu and demands to be respected as such. We had a coronavirus patient whose temperature surpassed 107 degrees. He was packed in bags of ice at the time and in his 30s.

Last week, Jeremy Samuel Faust, an emergency medicine physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, explained in an article he wrote that the number of deaths widely attributed to the flu is based on an inflated Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistical estimate while the number attributed to the coronavirus reflects confirmed deaths. To compare apples to apples he juxtaposed the number of coronavirus deaths in the United States during the second full week of April with the number confirmed to have died from the flu during the deadliest week the last seven flu seasons. His research showed that showed COVID-19 is 9.5 to 44 times deadlier than the flu.

That explains multiple heightened protocols we follow working with COVID-19 patients. In the hallway leading into the ICU you have to pass through an added plastic containment barrier. No such barrier would be needed to shield others from flu patients. Nor has the number of influenza deaths in modern times required a refrigerated trailer outside the hospital to supplement the morgue.

Furthermore, we wouldn’t enter a COVID patient’s room without a protective gown, a hair net, shoe covers, goggles, a face shield and an N95 mask to ensure a proper seal rather than a looser-fitting surgical mask. Many nurses and other health care professionals also wear two layers of gloves. Myriam Lallemand, a Franciscan Health nurse with more than 20 years of ICU experience, told me she would not consider any of those measures necessary if treating a seasonal flu patient.

A third lesson is that even the most wealthy

and powerful among us are not masters of the universe. President Donald Trump spoke like a self-considered master of the universe in January when he claimed of the coronavirus, “We have it totally under control.” Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke more wisely and humbly in an interview in mid-April when he acknowledged that “ultimately the virus is going to determine when we really can safely reopen.”

Some of the patients who die from COVID-19 are wealthy and powerful and some are not. But they all got to a point where there was nothing all the money, power and best available medical treatment in the world could do to make them better. That should humble those who are mighty in their own estimation.

A fourth lesson I’ve learned

is that a second wave of coronavirus patients might be too much for some health care workers to bear. Pat Finneran, a distinguished Notre Dame graduate who flew combat missions in Vietnam as a Marine fighter pilot, knows a thing or three about war and told me those of us on the front lines of this battle could expect some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Nurses and other health care workers have already fought long and hard. It would be inconsiderate and unwise to take it for granted that they will all be able to handle a second wave of infected patients if state experiments with reopening do not work out well. The

ICU nurse, Myriam, is a long-distance runner and told me the prospect of a second wave of patients made her recall a race years ago when she got to what she thought was the finish line. She had only a little left in her tank — and then realized she still had miles to go. It was not the finish line.

I’ve also learned that idiocy is regrettably not a private disease. “Covidiots” packing parks and beaches without masks or social distancing harm themselves and also others. We treat whoever shows up at the ICU. But it troubles me when the warrior angels in scrubs I am privileged to work alongside have to risk their lives to care for the careless.