Doctor reflects on pain and loss during pandemic
There were days early in the COVID-19 pandemic that Dr. Funmi Falade had to remind herself to breathe.
Falade is medical director of critical care services at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport. As such, she and her team found themselves handling the stream of patients that flowed into the hospital at the peak of the pandemic.
It often got overwhelming, Falade said. She remembers the first time the hospital lost a young patient to COVID (though she wouldn’t give the patient’s age, due to privacy concerns). Falade said the patient had declined sharply overnight, and it soon became clear nothing could be done to save him.
“There was a moment when we all just stopped,” she said. “Everybody had to take a moment for this young man. We just sat there with him as his life slowly faded away.”
There were multiple moments like that in the early days of the pandemic, Falade said. And, though Connecticut is a better place now, it pains her that the United States is still struggling to contain the virus. The country recently passed the sad milestone of 200,000 COVID-19 deaths.
“Two-hundred thousand lives is a lot of lives for a world leader,” Falade said. “It breaks your heart to see this happen.”
She didn’t want to discuss the political aspects of how COVID has been handled nationwide, but said she dearly hopes the United States can move off the path it’s on.
“I am hopeful that we can, as a nation, come together to make sure we stem this loss of life in a meaningful way,” Falade said.
Even before St. Vincent’s saw a single COVID patient, Falade said she knew something terrifying was coming. She and her colleagues had already watched the virus snake through China, Italy and nearby New York.
“We had a lot of fear surrounding how to handle these patients, because there were so many unknowns,” she said. “Health care workers, all of us, are always ready to dive in, but that’s because we know what we are doing.”
However, Falade said, when COVID-19 started to escalate in Connecticut, most health workers were armed only with “adrenaline, good will and a very small amount of information.”
When the virus hit the state, Falade — like health care workers do — greeted it with everything she had. But, when that young patient was lost, “it felt like (our) best was just not enough.”
It was a frightening time for her and others in critical care. At the peak of Connecticut’s surge, St. Vincent’s had four ICUs, when it usually has only one, Falade said. All the patient beds were full, and many patients were acutely ill.
Some would succumb to COVID-19, but Falade said many didn’t. “There were multiple moments when a patient would come to and he would ask for a sandwich like nothing had happened,” she said.
The past six months have been a roller coaster, Falade said. “The experience was a huge learning one but also very humbling,” she said. “I think for me as a person who spent a lot of years training to take care of very sick people, it humbles you to see that there is so much more out there to learn; it made me very thankful to be able to help people.”
She cautioned that the pandemic is far from over, even in Connecticut, where hospitals such as St. Vincent’s no longer face the overflowing beds they did months ago. Though she’s hopeful that the state won’t go back to where it was, she said she’s taking nothing for granted.
“I will say this — it is important that we be prepared to surge (again),” she said. “COVID has been unique in its epidemiology and a little less predictable than we would like.”