Ida and COVID: ‘Twin-demic’ slams Louisiana hospitals
HOUMA, LA. >> The wind ripped chunks off the hospital’s roof and the entire building rumbled. One nurse said the cement pounding into the walls sounded like the loudest bowling alley she could imagine. Another felt like she was inside a meteor shower.
One of the most powerful hurricanes in the nation’s history was barreling into south Louisiana. Fifty miles southwest of New Orleans, the staff at Leonard J. Chabert Medical Center in Houma was already weary from a year and a half of caring for patients with COVID-19.
Now water was pouring from the ceiling tiles. A giant metal beam tore off the building and thumped into a glass door, over and over, like a battering ram. The medical staff prepared to keep patients on ventilators alive by hand if the worst were to happen.
Compounded disasters
Hurricane Ida was colliding with the country’s out-of-control pandemic. Hospitals facing a Category 4 storm typically either evacuate or discharge as many patients as possible. But this time, amid the community’s fourth, brutal surge of COVID, many of Chabert Medical Center’s patients were too sick to be sent home. And hospitals that lay outside the hurricane’s most destructive path were too full of COVID patients to absorb any more. So here they stayed — nurses, doctors, paramedics — exhausted from battling one catastrophe, watching through the windows as a second one tore into town with 150 mph winds.
“The mental stress on our employees is much worse now than it’s ever been,” said Richard Zuschlag, the
owner of Acadian Ambulance Service, the state’s largest emergency medical outfit. “COVID set us up for that. And the hurricane is the icing on the cake.”
Some nurses wept. The staff stood in a hallway, held hands and asked God to protect them. They feared any minute the building might collapse.
Across town, huge sections of the roof blew off Terrebonne General Health System, the largest hospital in Terrebonne Parish, whose bayous brimming with sinewy cypress trees run through the region like veins. Water poured in so quickly it looked like it was raining inside. The windows shattered, the walls shook and it sounded like a freight train.
As the hours passed, some nurses began asking the same question about the storm that they’d been pondering
about the pandemic for months: “When is this ever going to end?”
By the time the sun came up, both hospitals in Houma had endured so much damage, they had to coordinate a massive evacuation.
Dr. Chuck Burnell, the chief medical officer of Acadian Ambulance, was in the basement of Terrebonne General sorting out how to move more than 100 patients, many of them infected with COVID, some on ventilators.
Burnell has been an emergency physician for almost 30 years, and he said this is among the worst storms he’s been through, arriving as it did just as the state’s COVID deaths soared and its vaccination rate remained among the lowest in the country.
“We have the perfect twin-demic going on,” Burnell said. “This could not
have happened at a worse time. Mother Nature was not kind to us.”
“Are there happy moments here at all?”
In the spring of 2020, as Louisiana became one of the first places in the U.S. to be crushed by a COVID surge, Shayna Boudreaux worked 18-hour shifts for 33 days straight. As a paramedic for Acadian for 13 years, she’s used to handling seriously ill and injured patients in unforgiving conditions. On a good day the hours are long, she said, the work physically demanding and sometimes dangerous: She’s been attacked, assaulted and confronted with a gun. But nothing prepared her for this pandemic.
She raced panicked people gasping for breath to emergency rooms already teeming with sick patients. Many didn’t survive. It
nearly broke her.
“I cried for days just thinking about how we’re the last thing people see or talk to. We tell their family members, ‘Hey, they’re going to be all right’ to console them,” she said. “But then reality sets in that they weren’t all right. It wasn’t OK.”
Hard labor
Boudreaux and hundreds of other paramedics wore respirator masks and two pairs of gloves to try to keep the virus away from their bodies. They worked in blazing heat and stifling humidity, and through two hurricanes last year. Many stayed away from their families for months to avoid infecting loved ones, or stripped down naked outside their homes after each shift to keep from bringing the virus inside.
“We have a metal box where everything’s flying around at you,” said Burnell, the medical director. “It is a cesspool of COVID. I tell people there is a COVID fog in every ambulance.”
South Louisiana hospitals were stretched to their limits long before Ida brought her screaming winds and pelting rain.
Intensive care units filled to capacity, with some hospitals creating overflow units to accommodate patients so sick they couldn’t survive without extraordinary medical intervention. To keep up, nurses and doctors pulled extra hours, filling in for colleagues who’d caught the virus or simply had enough.
“You couldn’t even have a patient pass away before the room needed to be used,” said Phyllis Peoples, president and chief executive officer of Terrebonne General. “And some of our docs in there said, ‘Are there happy moments here at all?’”
Chabert hospital’s chief nursing officer, Jana Semere, said some nurses are burning out and leaving the profession after grueling 60-hour weeks filled with an unrelenting flow of COVID patients. Of Chabert’s eight ICU beds, they can only staff six: They simply don’t have the staff power amid a nationwide shortage of nurses.
Health care workers are now seeing whole families fall critically ill due to the highly communicable nature of the delta variant and the region’s low vaccination rate.
In recent weeks, Semere has watched patients in their 20s and 30s go on ventilators and die. A few weeks ago, a man and his mother were admitted to the ICU at a neighboring hospital. They died within five hours of each other. Semere was on the phone with a nurse at that hospital, and could hear the man’s wife wailing through the receiver.